


The Snow Wolf

by starfishstar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adventure, F/M, Gen, Romance, and added even more of them, fairy tale fusion, magical au, or: in which I took a 19th century fairy tale that's surprisingly full of strong female characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-03-25 06:47:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13828755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfishstar/pseuds/starfishstar
Summary: While on his undercover mission to the werewolves, Remus disappears. Tonks sets out north, across countries and islands and frozen terrain, on a quest to find the man she loves and reclaim him from the clutches of a powerful magical beast. Along the way, Tonks meets many who help – or hinder – her quest, until at last she reaches the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard to face the dreaded Snow Wolf himself.(A fairy tale fusion, bringing together the world of Harry Potter with the plot of Hans Christian Andersen’sThe Snow Queen– but you don't need to knowThe Snow Queento enjoy this.Or: in which I took a 19th century fairy tale that's surprisingly full of strong female characters, and added even more of them.)





	1. To the North

**Author's Note:**

> A fusion with _The Snow Queen_ by Hans Christian Andersen. (Snippets of inspiration also drawn from _Breadcrumbs_ by Anne Ursu, a modern-day retelling.) You don’t need to know _The Snow Queen_ to read this – though if you do know the original, I hope you’ll enjoy the nods and parallels throughout!
> 
> This is an AU, but takes places during HBP and slots pretty much into the chronology of canon, as long as you subtract the bits when Harry crossed paths with Tonks or Remus during HBP – they’re on a different adventure here. (Also, ignore Pottermore; in my mind, Remus and Tonks had begun at least the tentative unfurling of a romance by the end of OotP.) 
> 
> My greatest of thanks to **gilpin25** for betareading in such detail and being so thoughtful in response to my many questions; also to **huldrejenta** and **nerakrose** for fielding questions about Norwegian geography and language, and Scandinavian names, respectively; and to brickspace friend E for betareading early sections. An early, partial version of this story posted at **rt_morelove** (over a year ago!) but a lot has changed and grown since then, so I invite anyone who’s interested to read along again!

One moment, all was calm in the werewolves’ camp. The autumn wind was chill, and Remus leaned closer to the fire, grateful for its warmth. A moment later, everything was chaos.

Screams came from all directions, too many different voices to distinguish. Old and young alike scattered in panic, trying in vain to conceal themselves somewhere in the open, unforgiving terrain of the moor. Someone’s flailing elbow or shoulder knocked into Remus as they rushed past, and he landed hard on the bare ground with the wind knocked out of him.

He felt the presence of the predator even before he opened his eyes to see it: standing over him, massive forelegs braced on either side of Remus’ chest, was a great white wolf, twice the size of any Remus had ever seen.

It was a werewolf, Remus saw that immediately.

Even though that shouldn’t be possible, because it wasn’t the full moon and no werewolf could transform at will when the moon wasn’t full, that was only the stuff of legends, so _how_ –

The wolf growled, low and fierce from the depths of its throat, its canny yellow eyes never leaving Remus’ face. Accustomed though he was to the presence of wolves, Remus felt every hair on his body stand on end. This wolf poised above him was the very essence of predation.

Remus froze, willing his muscles to perfect stillness. He didn’t stand a chance in a fight against this beast, but perhaps he could make himself uninteresting as prey. What could a werewolf want, anyway, with a man who was already a werewolf?

Gracefully, almost gently, the wolf lifted its right foreleg until its paw dangled in the air above Remus. Then it lowered that paw until one fearsome claw just barely grazed Remus’ chest, precisely above his heart. The wolf pressed down, so gently, until the claw penetrated the fabric of Remus’ shirt and pricked his skin.

Though the claw barely broke the surface, Remus felt as if a dagger of ice had stabbed straight into his heart. Despite his determination to stay still, he gasped.

At that sound, the wolf looked into his face and seemed almost to smile.

Then it opened its jaws and blew a gust of breath into Remus’ face – not hot, but icy cold, and so strong that Remus had to close his eyes against the force of it. Ice seeped through his body from the claw at his heart and the wind at his face, a chill so intense he couldn’t summon the energy even to shiver. He struggled against it, trying to draw together what power was left in his muscles long enough for one desperate surge of motion up and away from this beast. But his body was losing strength faster than Remus could summon it back.

He gasped in one last gulp of breath-taking cold and the world went black.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

Tonks wasn’t in the best mood by the time she wrapped up her latest debriefing with Mad-Eye Moody in the basement kitchen at 12 Grimmauld Place. They’d covered the usual topics: the Order’s attempts to keep tabs on known Death Eaters, and all the obstacles that stymied those attempts. So much of the time they could do little more than trail after the Death Eaters, blocking actions here or there but unable to stem the movement as a whole.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame all of her irritation on the frustratingly slow pace of their work. Her foul mood undoubtedly also came from how much she hated being at Grimmauld Place now, remembering Sirius and how miserable he’d been while confined within these walls.

So when Dumbledore’s head poked unexpectedly round the doorframe, all flowing white beard and twinkly eyes and looking, as ever, as if he’d just trotted forth from a convivial chat with some of the more whimsical Hogwarts portraits, perhaps Tonks was already spoiling for a fight.

“Ah, Alastor, Nymphadora, I’m glad to catch you here,” Dumbledore said. He sailed across the flagstone floor, midnight blue robes fluttering behind him, and settled into a chair across the table from Tonks. “I bring grave news.”

Tonks tensed. Was it Remus? She always thought first of Remus, now, when anyone in the Order arrived with news. It was only a few weeks since he’d left on his risky, clandestine mission to infiltrate a werewolf pack, but Tonks felt like she’d been holding her breath ever since.

Remus had agreed to this mission at the worst possible time. Not that there was ever a great time to risk your life by joining a potentially hostile werewolf pack. But right now Remus’ grief over Sirius was still so raw. He’d continued about his duties for the Order with a grim-jawed determination, but Tonks saw how he braced himself around that private pain.

And he’d started shutting Tonks out, though it was painfully clear he felt the pull that had been growing between them over the past year just as much as she did. They’d had several miserable, messy rows before he left, about the danger he was putting himself in. Remus couldn’t seem to comprehend that a danger to himself might also impact the people who cared about him.

And then all too soon he’d been gone, swallowed up into his undercover mission, with everything still unresolved between them. As a matter of security, only Dumbledore was allowed even to know where he was.

So Tonks went to work in the Auror Department and did her work for the Order, and watched brave, powerful witches and wizards being murdered around her by Death Eaters, and went quietly out of her mind with the awfulness of not knowing what might happen next.

She looked at Dumbledore now across the kitchen table, and dug her fingernails into her palms as she waited to hear what he would say. She told herself she was ready for anything. Surely anything was better than the agony of not knowing?

Dumbledore looked directly at Tonks and said, “My news concerns Remus.”

She had thought she would panic when this moment came; instead, Tonks felt herself go very calm. She heard how her voice came out sounding capable and professional as she asked Dumbledore, “What’s happened to him?”

“He failed to appear for one of our regularly scheduled rendezvous,” Dumbledore said. There was none of the usual twinkle in his eye now. “Which is not necessarily an indication that anything is wrong, but it does strike me as very unlike him.”

Mad-Eye, silent until now, grunted his agreement.

“Where is he now? Did you find him?” Tonks demanded, her calm deserting her as panic rose in her chest.

Dumbledore, not to be rushed, went on, “I enquired, as discreetly as possible, with one or two members of the werewolf pack, particular individuals Remus had indicated were less likely to react with volatility at being approached by a stranger. But no one was willing to speak. Frankly, they seemed traumatised by some recent event and too frightened to say anything about it. All I could ascertain for certain is that Remus is no longer there.”

Tonks burst up out of her seat before she knew she was doing it. “And that’s it?” she shouted. “You found out he’s missing and that’s all the investigation you can be bothered to do about it?”

Dumbledore rose, too, so they were once again facing each other across the expanse of the kitchen table. “No, Nymphadora,” he said, with a gentleness that only fanned the flames of her anger. “You misunderstand me. I am not abandoning Remus. But the direct approach has not proved fruitful. We may need to bide our time and pursue more subtle lines of enquiry.”

Tonks pressed her hands down hard against the surface of the table to steady herself. “No. Tell me where the pack live and I’ll go there. I’ll get someone there to talk to me. I’ll find him.”

“Lass –” Moody began, also getting to his feet, his wooden leg clunking against the floor.

“ _No_ ,” Tonks repeated. “I’m going to find him.” She was glaring at Dumbledore, all her frustration of the last weeks spilling out. “You obviously know where this werewolf pack lives. I’ll find it one way or another, but we’ll save a lot of time if you tell me now.”

Dumbledore studied her over his half-moon glasses. Finally he said, “The pack make their winter encampment on a stretch of moorland in Scotland. I can give you a description detailed enough to allow you to Apparate there. But you must be careful, Nymphadora. Don’t forget that you shall be a lone human among werewolves who have been given no reason to think upon humans as their friends.”

Tonks nodded tightly. She was trying to focus on being grateful that Dumbledore had been so unexpectedly forthcoming. It was better than letting herself give way to panic and fear over where Remus might be. “Fine,” she said. “Tell me now. Because I’m going there right away.”

Dumbledore nodded. They both took their seats, and he carefully described to her how to find the place.

Tonks left 12 Grimmauld Place soon afterwards, supplied with nothing more than her wand and the light autumn cloak she’d been wearing when she went to Headquarters to meet Moody. It was morning still, but she was able to find a narrow side street where no one was around to see her Disapparate. She concentrated hard on the description Dumbledore had given her, the exact sights and sounds and scents of the particular bit of moor where Remus had last been seen. Then she closed her eyes, raised her wand, and spun.

She first knew she’d been successful by her sense of smell. The wind was fresher here and bore the scent of pine, and there was a chill nip to the air. Tonks opened her eyes, still holding her wand steadily aloft to meet whatever she might find.

The landscape that rolled out before her was stark yet quietly lovely, an endless stretch of muted brown-gold colour made up of grasses and low, scrubby plants under scudding clouds. It would be a good place for quiet contemplation, or a long walk in the bracing air. But all Tonks could think was that Remus was supposed to be here, and now he _wasn’t_.

Look for the small stand of trees, Dumbledore had said. The pack made their makeshift home where a cluster of birches offered some slight protection from the elements.

Tonks could see those trees in the distance, but she also knew better than to approach the pack’s encampment directly. They would perceive her as a threat, and rightly so.

What, then? Scout around the area, try to find one or two werewolves on their own, separate from the rest of the pack? What little Remus had related about werewolf packs told her that at the moment most of the pack were most likely out hunting small game and scavenging for food. Perhaps she’d be lucky enough to find one person, out scavenging on their own, who she could approach and talk to. Of course, that was assuming they didn’t smell her coming a mile off, this human intruder, and find a way to conceal themselves. She knew so little of werewolf magic.

Tonks clutched her cloak around her against the chill wind and set out across the moor.

It took until well into the afternoon, but Tonks did, almost entirely to her surprise, manage to find a werewolf.

It was a young woman, perhaps only eighteen or nineteen, perhaps not yet as skilled as she ought to have been at evading the non-werewolves of the world. The woman was bent down, gathering sticks of firewood from the ground beneath a few evergreen trees clustered on the slope of a low hill. She looked up in terror at Tonks’ approach.

“Don’t be frightened,” Tonks pleaded, holding out her hands to show they were empty. She’d stowed her wand well out of sight in her cloak before beginning her search. It was another of the things she knew from Remus: most werewolves didn’t carry wands. They’d never had the opportunity to learn wand magic, and consequently were mistrustful of those who did.

The young woman dropped low to the ground in a protective crouch, staring up at Tonks with wide, dark eyes.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Tonks said urgently. “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to ask you one question. Is that okay? Can I ask you a question?”

Very slowly, never breaking eye contact, the woman nodded.

“My friend –” Tonks began, her voice almost breaking on that word. Remus was so much more than a friend. Even though they’d still been struggling to figure out what, precisely, they were or could be to each other, when Remus had left on this mission. Still, the word didn’t do him justice. “My friend, Remus. You might know him by a different name, a werewolf name, but I think you’ll know who I mean. He came to live with your pack, just last full moon. And now he’s – disappeared.” She steeled herself. Best to ask the worst first. “Is he dead?” 

The young woman’s eyes had widened and widened in fear as Tonks spoke. By the time Tonks asked her question, the woman looked as though she might keel over from fright. She stared in silence for so long, Tonks thought she wasn’t going to answer at all.

But Tonks could stay silent too. She gazed back at the woman crouched on the ground in front of her, trying to convey compassion with her eyes, but also a determination that she wasn’t going to leave. Not until she found an answer.

Finally the woman spoke. Soft and quavering, she whispered, “He is not dead.”

Tonks felt a wave of relief crash over her, so powerful that she stumbled a step forward. “Where is he?” she burst out, momentarily heedless of the timid woman in front of her.

The woman flinched, cowering lower to the ground, then shook her head vehemently. “I can’t –” she gasped. ”It’s too terrible – I _can’t_.”

Tonks was more than ready to demand an answer, to stand there and argue for as long as it took – but she looked at the young woman in front of her and saw that she meant it: she really couldn’t. She was trembling bodily with fear, shaking like a last withered leaf clinging to a tree in an autumn gale. Then Tonks pictured what she herself must look like, towering over this young frightened thing, and was ashamed of herself.

Slowly, making no sudden movements, Tonks lowered herself to the ground as well, holding her hands out to her sides as she moved to show that they were still empty and no threat. She came to rest somewhat awkwardly on her haunches, but at least now she and the woman were at the same eye level.

“I’m sorry,” Tonks said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I see that you can’t tell me what happened. It’s all right. But maybe you can tell me which way I need to go, to look for my friend? I’ve got to find him. I just – I have to find him, that’s all.”

The woman still stared at Tonks, but then she blinked, slowly. Tonks wondered if it was the first time she’d allowed her eyes to close for even that brief a moment in Tonks’ presence.

“North,” the woman whispered.

Tonks looked at her, baffled. “North…what?”

“Go north to find him.”

“Just…go north? How far north?”

“The wind will show you the way. Follow the wind to the north.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand.”

The woman blinked once more. “No,” she agreed softly, perhaps speaking only to herself. “You are not a werewolf. You do not know our magicks.” She tilted her head almost imperceptibly, considering. “Do you bear a wand?”

No point in not admitting it now. “Yes.”

“Can you do a spell that will show you the way the wind is blowing, and allow you always to follow the wind?”

Still baffled, Tonks said, “I suppose I could figure out something like that, yes.”

The woman nodded sharply, the first decisive movement she had made. “Then do that, now. Go.”

Tonks knew a dismissal when she heard one. And she knew she’d learned all she was going to learn from this woman – more, really, than she could have dared to hope. She stood, feeling again the chill wind that gusted past her along the hillside. Surprisingly chill, in fact, for only early autumn.

Follow the wind. Right, well, it was the only clue she had, and she would take it.

“Thank you,” she said to the young woman where she crouched on the ground with her meagre bundle of firewood sticks. “You’ve helped me a lot, when you didn’t have to. I appreciate it.”

The woman nodded slowly, but said nothing more. So Tonks stepped quietly away from her and started walking in the direction she judged to be north.

She waited to use her wand until she was out of sight of the young woman, not wanting to cause her unnecessary alarm. But once she was standing alone on the open moor, Tonks withdrew her wand from the folds of her cloak and raised it in front of her. The wind was whipping around her now, snapping her cloak against her legs.

She’d had time to think over possible spells, and decided a combination of a directional spell and an advanced summoning charm might approximate what the woman had described, and that a nonverbal spell suited the situation best. Fascinating to think werewolves could do this sort of thing as a matter of course, and without the aid of a wand. So much about werewolf magic was unknown to anyone but themselves.

Tonks lifted her wand higher, raised her eyes to the billowing underbelly of the cloudy sky, and focused hard on her two chosen spells. All the while she was thinking, too, of Remus and her desperate need to find him. She pulled that into her spellwork, that awareness of Remus and the danger he might be in, which thrummed like a steady pulse beneath everything she did.

Tonks knew the spell had worked when the wind gusted against her back with a force that nearly knocked her off her feet, and at the same time she felt a strong impulse to run in the direction it blew. She didn’t hesitate. She stowed her wand away and took off running, the wind at her back urging her on.

She ran, never stopping, feeling as if she were flying. Though Tonks’ feet never left the ground, the wind seemed almost to carry her, rushing her forward on its current like a great invisible river. Evening came, dusk fell, then dark, and still Tonks ran on, up and down great hills and fells, exhausted but exhilarated, her mind clearer now that she knew she was moving in the right direction, towards her goal.

She’d left London so precipitously. Dumbledore had brought the terrible news that Remus was missing, and everything inside Tonks had seized up in terror. This was what she’d been dreading every moment since Remus had left on his mission: that his noble propensity for risking himself for the sake of the Order would put him in true danger.

She should have taken time to think through a plan. Should have packed supplies, should have sought advice beyond merely accepting Moody’s terse admonition to keep her wits about her. She didn’t even know where she was going, beyond “north,” or what had happened back at the werewolf pack to frighten the young woman so badly that she couldn’t even speak of it.

All Tonks knew was that if Remus needed her help, she was going to give it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very appropriately for a story swirling with ice and snow, I'm posting this first chapter from inside a snowstorm in Edinburgh. If I can swing it, I'll post the next chapter while I'm still in Edinburgh, and specifically I'll post from the café where JKR wrote back in the very early days. Because writing in the café where JKR used to write makes me happier than I can describe. :-) 
> 
> Chapters will post irregularly but frequently; the entire story is written, so it's just a matter of finding time to post. I hope you enjoy!


	2. The Garden of Enchantments

Tonks came abruptly to a halt at the top of a low cliff, and found she’d come to the edge of the land. In front of her, the ground tumbled down for a few feet as rocky scree, then dropped into the sea. Though the sky was only now beginning to lighten into a grey dawn, to Tonks it felt as if she’d run for days, in the strange, almost dreamlike state of following the wind and the spell she’d cast.

She put her hands on her hips and caught her breath.

To her left stood a cottage. It was a tidy little place built of stone, surrounded by a garden of colourful flowers and a trim white fence, perched there at the very spot where the grass ended and the land dropped down to meet the sea.

Now that she’d stopped moving, an awareness of her body caught up with Tonks all at once. She was so tired she was nearly swaying on her feet, and she hadn’t eaten anything since… Well, she wasn’t sure when she’d last eaten, actually. Sometime before she’d left London.

The sky above the sea was tinged a delicate shade of pink in the east where the sun, though not yet risen, was making its approach known from beneath the horizon. A new day was beginning. Had she truly left London only yesterday?

Tonks stood there, shivering, aware now how chilled she was in the pre-dawn air. She should approach the cottage, she decided. She could at least ask if whoever lived there might be willing to give her something to eat. Perhaps they would even be able to give her directions about how best to continue northwards, now that she’d run out of land on which to go by foot.

Before she could start forward, though, the cottage’s little door swung open.

“Why, hello!” cried the woman who stepped out of it, a warm Scottish burr to her voice. She was a tallish, plumpish woman with silver hair gathered tidily in a clip at the nape of her neck, and she wore a gardening apron over her dress. She smiled delightedly and gave an energetic wave in Tonks’ direction. “Hello, hello!” she repeated as she hurried down the garden path and unlatched the gate, then rushed through it and reached out to catch Tonks’ hands in her own. “What a delightful surprise! A visitor! So few people come this way, oh, this _is_ a treat. Won’t you come inside, my dear? Oh, do say you’ll join me at least for a cup of tea.”

Bowled over by this unexpected reception, Tonks said, “I’d be glad for a chance to warm up for a little bit, if you don’t mind. But maybe you can also tell me how to get to –”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” the woman exclaimed. “Come right this way, dear, up the path, follow me.”

So Tonks, tired and bemused, followed her enthusiastic host through a profusion of blooming flowers and into the little cottage.

“Just sit right there and make yourself at home while I get everything ready,” the woman fussed, once they were inside her little yellow-painted kitchen. Curtains framed windows that looked out to the garden and over the sea, and everything was cosy and bright.

This woman was like several Molly Weasleys put together, Tonks thought with amusement, watching her host set out plate after plate of mouth-watering biscuits and dainty sandwiches to accompany the promised tea, as well as a bowl of sweet red cherries.

“Would you be a dear and help me carry these things outside?” the woman asked. “I do so love to breakfast outdoors, in the company of my flowers, and sunrise is such a lovely time of day.”

Tonks thought it would be too cold to sit outside, especially here where the wind blew off the sea. But when she followed the woman out again to the garden, she found that the sun was now fully risen and the day had turned pleasantly mild.

And all around, flowers were blooming. The ground was a carpet of delicate white snowdrops and luminous buttercups in warm shades of yellow. In amongst them, bunches of narcissus poked out their comical faces, and pink and purple hyacinths sprang up out of the ground like bright bursts of joy. Tonks marvelled at the sight of so many flowers blooming – so many s _pringtime_ flowers, even though it was autumn. Clearly there was more than a little magic at work here.

“Now, you’ve been travelling a hard journey with the wind at your back, haven’t you?” the woman chattered, once they’d set out the plates and teacups on a little table nestled against the lee side of the house. They settled themselves into the two chairs there, one on either side of the table.

This section of the garden was mainly hyacinths, in vibrant shades of red and violet and salmon and peach, all swaying gently in the breeze. Tonks gratefully took a biscuit from the plate her host nudged towards her.

The woman leaned forward. “You must tell me _all_ about it, my dear. Where do you come from? Where are you going? You have the look of someone who’s setting out on a quest, that’s what I say. Have I guessed it right, darling girl?”

Tonks paused in surprise, the biscuit halfway to her mouth. She hadn’t ever stopped moving long enough to think of it in those terms, but that was true, wasn’t it? Remus had gone missing and she’d dashed straight out to bring him safely back, never mind that she didn’t know where he was or how to find him, and she would have to figure it all out as she went. Yeah, that was pretty much the definition of a quest.

She looked at her host, whose sympathetic eyes were fixed on Tonks, and found herself telling the whole story.

She didn’t say anything about what Remus had been doing when he disappeared, of course – his mission with the werewolves was sensitive Order business, and even Tonks wasn’t allowed to know the details.

But she found herself telling about Remus himself, alternating her tale with bites of a delicious watercress sandwich her host urged on her. She described how they made each other laugh, how Remus turned out to have a sly sense of humour that slipped out more and more often as he allowed himself to let his guard down with her. And how over the past year, without either of them quite noticing, what began as a friendship had turned into something more than either of them had been prepared for.

“He wouldn’t just leave,” Tonks said. It felt self-indulgent to go into such detail about this with a stranger, but the woman really seemed to hang on Tonks’ every word. “Remus has such a sense of responsibility. Yeah, he’s not always great with emotions, I know that. I could probably see him going to some extreme lengths to avoid having to talk about his feelings. But shirking work? Not him.” She shivered. “If Remus has disappeared like this, something is wrong.”

Her host’s eyes were moist with sympathy. “But tell me, dear, wasn’t there any sign left behind of where he might have gone? Have you any clue to follow?”

Tonks chose her words carefully, so as not to give away any of the ‘oh and by the way also he was living with a werewolf pack at the time’ aspects of the story. “There was...one person I talked to, who told me which way to go to look for him. It sounded like she’d been there when it happened, whatever it is that happened to Remus. And it scared her so much that she couldn’t even talk about it, but she _promised_ me she saw him still alive, and she told me to follow the wind north, which is how I ended up here. It seemed like, I don’t know, like she’d seen some terrible creature come there and steal him away.”

Did she imagine it, or had her host given a small shudder at those last words?

At any rate, she’d almost certainly shared more of a personal nature than her host had really wanted to hear. So Tonks turned her attention determinedly to another sandwich, this one cucumber.

“You must miss him terribly,” the woman said suddenly in a low, fervent voice.

Tonks nearly jumped in her seat, startled out of her own thoughts. She reached for her teacup and took a sip to cover up her overreaction.

“I lost someone, too,” the woman continued in that same intense voice. “My sister…it was so long ago…”

“I didn’t _lose_ him,” Tonks retorted, then wondered what was wrong with her. Her host shared something painful from her own past, and Tonks responded by snapping at her? But something about that phrasing – _lost someone_ – put her hackles up. “I just mean,” she hurried on, “that I’m going to find him. Like you said, it’s a quest. I’ve only just started out, but I won’t stop looking.”

The woman turned such mournful eyes on Tonks, she hardly seemed the same jolly person who’d hailed her so enthusiastically when she first stood outside the garden gate.

“Er,” Tonks said. Something about this whole interaction had grown deeply unsettling, though she couldn’t have said precisely why. To deflect attention and give herself time to think, she reached for one of the cherries that sat on the table in a little white bowl and popped it into her mouth, playing at casual when actually her senses were on high alert. “You say you had a sister? What happened to her?”

“We were so close.” The woman’s gaze was still fixed intently on Tonks. “We did everything together. She was older and she looked after me. She protected me. I thought she would stay with me, always. But then she decided to go north...”

It was truly creepy, now, the way the woman wouldn’t stop staring at Tonks with those terribly melancholy eyes. Tonks chewed on the cherry she’d taken, awkwardly aware of every movement of her mouth and of the sweet flavour bursting brightly across her tongue, in such contrast to this oddly darkening conversation. As soon as she could, she spit the stone out discreetly into her palm and dropped it onto the edge of her plate, where a last few biscuit crumbs lay scattered.

“But now, oh, how good it is that the wind has brought you to my door!” her host exclaimed. “I needn’t be lonely anymore. You can stay here, my dear, don’t you see? We’ll be so happy. I’ll bake you scones and make you tea and we’ll breakfast every day here in the sunlight amongst the beautiful flowers. You will be so happy, sweet girl, if only you’ll stay with me.”

Now it was Tonks’ turn to stare. _Stay_ here? Why would the woman say that? Hadn’t Tonks just got done telling her that she was on a quest? A quest to find...

She was on a quest…

because...

Tonks felt everything inside her blaze momentarily hot, then icy cold.

She couldn’t remember.

 _She_ _couldn’t remember._ Just moments ago she’d been telling the woman about her quest, but now she couldn’t remember where she was going or what she was supposed to be questing for. Surely she could remember that, at least, of course she knew she was supposed to find…

_Who was she supposed to find?_

Tonks leapt to her feet, distantly aware of her chair clattering to the ground behind her.

“What did you do?” Tonks demanded. “What did you do to me? Why can’t I remember how I got here, or where I’m going or, or – anything! What magic did you do? Was it in the food?” Tonks stared down at the table, set for a tea that no longer seemed charming. Was it the biscuits that were cursed? The cherries? Could Tonks work out a countercharm even without knowing the original spell?

Tears leaked from the woman’s eyes and she seemed to crumple down into herself, until she huddled with her head hanging morosely over her elbows where they rested on the table. “I get so lonely,” she whispered. “So very... very lonely... I only wanted someone to stay with me, someone to be like a sister to me, since my sister left me alone…”

“That’s not how this works,” Tonks spat at her, fear making her cruel. “You don’t trap people into staying with you. That’s not how _love_ works.”

The woman gave a pathetic little sob and sank further down over her own slumped arms.

Tonks spun on her heel, away from the woman. She could work this out on her own. She could find a countercharm. Okay: magic garden, full of enchantments, there must be something here that would help her memory, at least enough to tell her what she’d forgotten to remember.

There was a person-sized hole in her, an absent memory of someone she cared about enough that it had driven her out into the world to search. But instead of finding that missing person, she’d ended up here in the strange garden of this woman who’d tried to poison Tonks’ mind.

Panic rising in her no matter how much she tried to fight it down, Tonks ran back and forth through the garden, peering into all its nooks and crannies, desperate for anything that might give rise to memory.

A carpet of delicate white snowdrops, a little arbour with a wooden bench tucked in amongst its drapery of leaves, trumpet flowers swinging ponderously from vines that climbed the cottage wall...

Then, in a far corner, a single plant caught her eye.

This plant bore stalks of delicate, deep purple flowers. The shape of each blossom might, to a fanciful mind, resemble a miniature friar’s cowl, which was what lent the plant one of its several names: monkshood.

Aconite.

 _Wolfsbane_.

How many times had Tonks pored over herbology texts and references, wishing that a novice potion maker like herself could somehow learn to safely produce Wolfsbane Potion and save Remus so much suffering? She’d eventually had to accept, to her great frustration, the hard truth that only a master potioneer should attempt such a difficult recipe. But by then Tonks had looked at so many illustrations that she could recognise wolfsbane anywhere.

With the sight of the wolfsbane’s delicate purple blossoms, all the rest came rushing back: Remus’ mission to the werewolf pack. The terrifying news that he’d gone missing. Tonks’ mad dash into the world to find him.

And _Remus_ , Remus himself, Remus with his wry smiles and his deep chuckle and his particular way of saying her name that sent flutters straight to Tonks’ stomach, no matter how valiantly she’d tried for nearly a year to ignore that feeling.

Tonks could never forget Remus.

As Tonks stared down in shock at the wolfsbane, waves of memory crashing over her, her host had slunk quietly up behind her. Now Tonks spun around to face her.

The woman stood slumped and wretched, her arms clutched around her middle, tear tracks running down her face, a shell of the merry figure who’d first invited Tonks into her garden.

“I’m sorry,” the woman whispered miserably. “It was wrong of me to trick you.”

“Yeah,” said Tonks. “It was. I’ve found my missing memories, despite what you did. And now, somehow, I’m going to find a way to keep going north from here.”

She turned towards the garden gate to leave, but the woman took a step forward, putting herself in Tonks’ way. Tonks stepped instinctively back, out of her range.

“I can help you,” the woman said. “Let me make it up to you for what I did, let me help you on your onward journey.”

“You think I want your help?” Tonks cried. “I don’t want anything from you, except for you not to steal any more of my memories, thanks.”

The woman flinched at that, but she continued doggedly, “I know where you need to go. I don’t know the name of the beast you seek, but I do know it exists and I know the part of the world in which it lives. You can to choose to believe me or not. But if you wait at the shore here at dusk, I’ll ask a fisher I know to come and transport you as far as the Shetland Islands. There you can seek advice as to the rest of the way.”

Tonks glared at her suspiciously. She did look guileless, but then, she’d seemed that way when she’d first invited Tonks in for tea, too, hadn’t she?

“Believe me or not,” the woman repeated. “I’ll ask the fisher to come for you, and you can decide as you like.” She hesitated, arms tightening where they clenched around her body. “And if, in your journey, you happen to encounter my sister...”

Tonks braced herself for whatever unethical magical subterfuge the woman might suggest next.

The woman’s eyes were wells of sorrow and Tonks wondered that she’d ever thought her cheerful, with nothing more on her mind than enthusiasm for welcoming a passing traveller. The woman seemed to struggle to drag her voice above a whisper. But finally she straightened her back, looked Tonks in the eye and said, “If you see my sister…will you tell her that I miss her?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm unfortunately not posting this chapter from the precise café where I'd hoped to be today, because they (like about half of Edinburgh) are closed due to the snow. (I'm directly downstairs from that place, though!) But I'm still posting this from snowy, snowy Edinburgh, and it is still magical to be writing about Harry Potter characters in J.K. Rowling's city. As always, these Harry Potter characters do not belong to me, and the basic plot arc here belongs to Hans Christian Andersen. :-)


	3. The Two Witches of the Shetland Islands

 

Tonks stood on the little rocky beach beneath the cliff where the woman’s cottage perched, and gazed northwards out to sea. The waves were choppy and grey and the wind was raw again, now that she was no longer within the confines of the enchanted garden. Her cloak wasn’t really warm enough for this weather. Tonks wrapped her arms around herself and squinted harder out over the slate-coloured expanse of the North Sea.

She hadn’t particularly wanted to accept a favour from the person who’d tried to steal her memories, but it wasn’t like she had a lot of other options. _Go north_ was the only lead she had to follow, and she’d run out of land to do it on. All that remained was the open sea. So she’d decided she might as well see what she thought of this fisher that the woman with the garden would send. The fisher’s boat was supposed to arrive now, around dusk. Which was why Tonks was standing on this desolate shore, straining to catch any glimpse of someone approaching over the sea.

There: a dark speck of motion made itself known in the distance, through the encroaching gloom. As Tonks watched, the speck grew larger until she could make out the outline of a small fishing boat. It had a blue-painted hull, and perched atop that was a small wheelhouse painted white, large enough perhaps for two people to hunker down and shelter inside it, but only just.

Sooner than Tonks would have thought, the boat was nearly at the shore, bobbing on the swell a stone’s throw out from the land. A head poked out of the wheelhouse and the boat’s pilot proved to be a woman. She had white, flyaway hair that flew in every direction around a wrinkled, weather-beaten face. A black weatherproof cape flapped around her shoulders, making her look like an oversized bird.

“Can’t come any closer, too many rocks!” the woman yelled over the susurration of the surf. “You’ll have to wade out. It’s shallow here. You can dry off when you get on board.”

It was hard to properly express chagrin at the thought of plunging into the icy sea when all communication was conducted via shouting, so Tonks simply called back, “All right!”

She made sure her wand was secure, bunched her cloak up high around her shoulders so at least that wouldn’t get wet, then took a big breath and plunged into the water fast, before she had a chance to think too much about it.

She shouted at the cold of it. Even with the water only up to her hips, it felt as though the ocean had its grip on her whole body, trying to drag her under with its chill that shivered straight into her bones. Tonks shouted aloud in defiance as she forced her legs forward through the water, shouted to remind herself that she was alive and not the ocean’s prey, until finally she stood abreast of the bobbing fishing boat. She was waist deep in the water, shivering convulsively and stymied by this last and seemingly simplest step, the need to somehow heave herself on board despite the paralysing cold that gripped her limbs.

The fisherwoman reached out with surprisingly strong arms and hauled Tonks onto the deck of the little boat, where she landed, gasping.

“S-so c-c-c-cold!” Tonks shuddered, barely able to speak for the chattering of her teeth.

The fisherwoman looked distinctly unimpressed. She pursed her lips at Tonks, which deepened the weathered lines around her mouth. “You’re a witch, aren’t you? Dry yourself off and come inside.”

Tonks nodded, her head bobbing erratically from all the shivering and shuddering. She fumbled in her robes for a bit before her numb fingers finally managed to withdraw her wand. She cast a strong drying charm on her wet clothing, then a warming charm for good measure. When her shaking had slowed to the point that she thought she might manage to stay steady on her legs, Tonks cautiously stood.

The fisherwoman had disappeared back into the little wheelhouse, so Tonks followed her and found the woman at the tiller, coaxing the boat back into motion. Tonks wondered if it ran on petrol, or magic, or some combination of both. There were so many things she would be curious to ask about the boat under other circumstances, but this was hardly the time.

“Er, so,” Tonks said, though the woman looked very caught up in her work and not at all interested in Tonks standing there beside her. “I don’t know exactly what agreement you’ve worked out with the woman with the garden, but I certainly can pay you for this trip. It seems like you’re going an awfully long way out of your way, and I do have gold –”

“Don’t want your gold,” the woman interjected curtly. “A dream or two’ll do.”

“A – dream?”

The woman nodded once, sharply, then for a moment she did turn and look at Tonks. “It’s a long crossing,” she said a little more gently. “Ten hours or so, and that’s if the weather’s fair. We’ll be travelling overnight and there’s little enough to see out here in the nighttime, my lass. You might as well curl up on that pile of rope there and try to get some rest. And if you’re visited in the night by a dream or two, so much the better. That’s payment enough for the likes of me.”

Tonks found this enigmatic in the extreme, but she also knew better than to argue. If this woman was willing to take her halfway to Norway for the price of a dream, Tonks would take that offer.

And what then, when she got to Shetland? Which was, after all, still in the middle of the sea and doubtless not nearly as far north as she needed to go.

Well, she would just have to figure it out once she got there. The best she could do was to keep travelling, keep moving, and never, never give up.

So she pulled her cloak around herself, huddled down until she was somewhat comfortable on the thick rope that lay coiled along one side of the little wheelhouse, tucked her head into the crook of her elbow and determinedly told herself to sleep.

Time passed strangely, as Tonks huddled on her pile of rope and swayed hazily between sleep and wakefulness. Again, as when she had been running with the wind, it felt as though many days passed in the course of that one night, though she found it impossible to say for certain. Whenever Tonks surfaced into wakefulness long enough to look out through the open door of the wheelhouse, the sea was stormy and dark and brooding, cold rain lashing down at a slant against the churning grey waters.

And whenever she slipped far enough down into sleep to dream, the dreams seemed to rush past as smoky figures on the night winds. Tonks saw Remus on the back of a huge, white wolf, riding the howling winds through the air. Then he was lying flat on his back in a blinding expanse of snow, pinned in place by a paw that the enormous wolf pressed down against his heart.

Tonks gasped awake, so real had it seemed, but of course there was nothing there to see but the white-haired fisherwoman hunched under her big black rain cape, hands on the tiller, staring out into the limitless darkness of the ocean and the night.

The next time Tonks awoke, the sky was a little lighter, with the barest hint of pale dawn creeping up from the unbroken line of the horizon in the east. And Tonks was sure she saw the woman gone from her place in the wheelhouse, and instead there was a big black raven flying out ahead of the boat, flapping its wings and keeping just above the spray. But Tonks fell asleep again and when she awoke of course it was just the fisherwoman, steering her boat, and not a bird at all.

They reached land as true dawn broke, and steered towards a little rocky shore that looked much like the one they’d left behind on the mainland. Here, though, at least the woman was able to manoeuvre in alongside an abandoned dock, instead of making Tonks wade through the water.

“Here’s where you go ashore,” the fisherwoman grunted from her tiller, as the boat bobbed gently against a decaying wooden pylon.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to pay you?” Tonks asked, fighting down a yawn and shivering in the dawn chill as she prepared to jump from the boat’s edge to the dock.

“Already did,” the woman said, and Tonks looked over at her in surprise.

“The wolf has not harmed him,” the woman said, more softly. “He lives still.” For just a moment she turned around and looked Tonks full in the face. Her eyes were pale grey and piercing, and Tonks shuddered as she understood what the woman meant. She’d actually seen Tonks’ dreams? Did that mean that what Tonks had seen – Remus held captive by an enormous wolf in a realm of snow – was real?

“But is he –” Tonks started.

“There’s magic on Shetland, if you know where to look,” the fisherwoman said, facing forward again. The wind was kicking up and she was wrestling with the tiller to keep her boat even with the dock. “Witches and wizards here, more than you’d think. Two witches, in particular. One’s something of a princess, you could say, from a long line of Shetland mages. Other one is her partner, chosen for her wisdom. Folks seek them out for advice when there’s something they’re searching for. Hop out now, would you, or you’re going to have to swim.”

Startled, Tonks turned and made the jump across the gap that was indeed widening between the boat and the dock. When she looked back, the woman was already steering her craft away.

“Wait!” Tonks called. “These two witches – where will I find them?”

“There’s a castle!” the woman shouted back over the rising wind, sounding unconcerned at her own lack of specificity. “Walk north through the isles and you’ll find it.”

“Thank you!” Tonks yelled over the whipping of the wind, not sure if the woman could still hear her. She thought she saw the woman shrug, looking almost irritated at the appreciation.

Then the boat lurched, and its engine growled, and then it was truly out of range of any conversation.

Right. Find a castle somewhere on these islands. Well, at least that was a bit more specific than all this vague ‘go north’ business. Tonks wrapped her inadequate cloak around herself and picked her way up the rocks of the shore, heading for the more level land above. There, a grassy expanse stretched out ahead as far as she could see, with no one and nothing in sight.

There was nothing for it but to start walking.

She walked long enough that she lost track of time. The position of the sun was no help, since it was hidden behind deep layers of clouds. And all the time she walked, Tonks’ mind worried helplessly over the mystery of what had happened to Remus.

The awful thing was, he’d gone on the mission knowing how dangerous it was. The Order had needed someone who could blend in among werewolves and there was Remus, perfect for the job and so stupidly, marvellously loyal. There was never any doubt that he would go.

Tonks couldn’t blame him, of course – in his place, she’d have done the same.

But did he understand how terribly he was missed?

Squinting out over the sea as she walked more or less parallel to the long, jagged coastline, Tonks examined what little she knew of Remus’ disappearance.

It didn’t seem like the straightforward violence of a feud between werewolf packs. That wouldn’t account for the terror in the eyes of the young werewolf who’d first directed Tonks north. Nor did it bear any of the hallmarks that would suggest the malicious cruelty of Death Eaters. If the Death Eaters had managed to pick off a member of the Order, they would be gloating about it.

Fenrir Greyback, too, would be gloating.

 _Who_ , then?

She came up with no answers.

At long last, around what Tonks judged to be roughly mid-afternoon, she reached a narrow road and was able to continue on that, instead of over the rougher open terrain.

After what seemed another age, she heard a rumbling behind her on the road and turned to see a car rattling towards her, an old Vauxhall in an indeterminate mustard yellowish colour. Muggle or magical? It was hard to tell at a distance. 

Tonks flung out an arm as the car drew near, and it coughed to a halt beside her.

The driver leaned out his window, a man of perhaps sixty with a weather-beaten face and a battered cap on his head. He raised his eyebrows at her in greeting and said, “Afternoon.” She still couldn’t quite guess whether he was a wizard or not, though she wished she could. It would change a lot about how and how much she asked him.

“Good afternoon,” Tonks said, trying to sound very casual, as though she often went for walks along desolate roads in far-flung corners of these isles. “Do you happen to be heading towards –” And then she stopped, remembering that she didn’t even know the name of this castle she was looking for. “…Towards the north?” she finished lamely.

The man’s eyes twinkled. “Aye. You could say so.”

“And is there… is there a castle, somewhere up that way?”

The man’s gaze sharpened from a twinkle into definite curiosity. “And what castle would that be? One that’s home to two wise witches, perhaps?”

All right, then: the man was a wizard. Even if he was driving a very Muggle vehicle. And that meant there was nothing to lose by asking.

“Yes,” Tonks said. “Those are exactly the two witches I’m trying to find. Do you know the way there? There’s something I need to ask them.”

The man looked her up and down, then nodded slowly. “Well,” he said, “you won’t be the first. Folks come from far and wide to seek their counsel.” He nodded again, this time briskly. “Get in. I’m going that way, or most of it. I’ll drive you there.”

“I – all right,” Tonks said, surprised by the offer but grateful. “Thank you.”

They rattled along northwards for the rest of the afternoon. A sombre dusk was falling by the time the driver pointed and said, “Up there.”

A castle perched on a crag some distance ahead. It was not large, but it was old and solidly built of stone, and it made an imposing outline there against the evening sky. Though she could see the castle in its complete form, somehow Tonks could tell that Muggles looking at it would see only an old ruin, just as they did with Hogwarts.

“The car won’t get much closer than this,” the man said. “That’s a powerfully magical place there and Muggle things go haywire if you get too close. But I’ll drive you as far as the road goes, and you can walk from there.”

“Thank you,” Tonks said, the words feeling inadequate. First the fisherwoman, then this man, offering so much help to a stranger. “I don’t know where you intended to drive today, but I can tell you went out of your way for me. Can I pay you back for the lift somehow?”

The man shook his head. They were jostling now over a rutted track, the very last section of the road. “The mage and her companion will know I brought you to them. Keeping in their good books, that’s all the currency I need.”

He let her out where the dirt road dead-ended in a field that contained several sheep, grazing unconcernedly. Then he carefully backed the yellow Vauxhall around and pulled away.

Tonks turned her eyes up to the looming castle, the home of this Shetland mage who was said to be so wise. It was too much to hope that a witch on a remote Scottish isle would know exactly what had happened to Remus hundreds of miles away in an entirely different part of the country. But there was the chance she might at least know something.

Tonks started up the hill. When she reached the top, she found the castle’s great wooden door flung open, no moat or portcullis or guards to block her way. That seemed a tad eccentric, but then what about this journey _hadn’t_ been eccentric? Cautiously, Tonks stepped between the massive stone walls.

The inside of the castle was utterly opposite to the impression made by its outside, with all that hulking stone. Inside, the walls were draped with tapestries in warm colours, and soft light emanated from some unseen source. Tonks stood in a narrow entryway, but she could see up ahead that the passage opened into some sort of great hall at what must be the centre of the castle.

Tonks glanced behind her, out through the doorway of the castle where the last, weak light of evening filtered in. When she turned to face forward again, a woman stood in front of her.

“Hello,” the woman said, smiling. She had long, dark hair and a flowing robe, and she wore a simple circlet of bronze about her forehead. Tonks saw at once why people referred to this woman as a mage, not merely a witch or even a sorceress. There was something timeless about her, as though she had sprung up out of the ground or emerged from one of the ancient stone circles that still dotted the British Isles.

“Good evening,” Tonks said. “Er. I hope I’m not intruding?”

The woman shook her head. “No seeker is unwelcome here. That’s why our doors always stand open. The castle knows the difference between a threat and a seeker of wisdom. Won’t you come inside?”

Without requiring a response, she turned and walked deeper into the castle, towards the great hall at its heart. For a brief but unpleasant moment, Tonks thought of the woman with the garden, who had seemed kind but harboured such unpleasant intentions. Did Tonks dare to walk into a complete unknown again?

Yes, because she had no choice. She had to find Remus. And to do that, she had to trust anyone who offered even a chance of telling her where he might be.

The woman – the mage – led the way into an enormous, high-ceilinged hall, larger than ought to be possible from the castle’s size as seen from the outside. It made Tonks smile, and the familiarity of it set her a little more at ease. Whether it was musty old canvas tents or grand stone castles, magical folk never could resist making improvements to their dwellings.

Despite its size, the hall wasn’t unwelcoming. Here, too, the whole space was suffused with warm light, and the floor was soft and pliant beneath Tonks’ feet. In fact, when she looked more closely, it appeared to be covered in live moss, as though an entire forest floor had been transplanted inside the castle.

Two thrones stood at the far end of the hall, each one carved from a single, massive tree trunk. In front of one of them stood a second woman, shorter and more solidly built than the mage, and with hair the colour of honey. The mage crossed the room to this second woman, ascended the two steps of the dais on which the thrones stood, and reached out to take her counterpart’s hand in an affectionate clasp.

“Our visitor,” the mage said.

As one, the two women turned to look at Tonks. Then they both sank gracefully onto their thrones.

Tonks stepped forward, stopping a few paces short of the dais, where she could look at both of them. How did one address ancient mages? ‘Ma’am’? ‘Your highness’?

Fortunately, the mage spared Tonks the difficulty of deciding by speaking first. “Now,” the dark-haired woman said, “what is it that you seek?”

Tonks breathed deeply and straightened her spine. She had to believe that these women would be able to help her.

“I’m looking for a friend,” she said. “A very dear friend. The man…that I love. He’s gone missing and I know he wouldn’t have left by his own choice. Someone who was there when he was taken told me to ‘follow the wind to the north.’ It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but it’s all I’ve got to go on. Also, I think there may have been a wolf involved, but I saw that in a dream, so I’m not sure.” The words tumbled out, now that she’d started. “I made it this far by always heading north, and I heard that you’re wise and that you help people who are searching for something.” She spread out her hands in supplication. “Can you help me? I’ll do whatever it takes to find him. I know he would do the same.”

The dark-haired mage fixed gentle eyes on Tonks. “Where was he, when he disappeared?”

Tonks hesitated. How much should she tell? Some things were Remus’ secrets to share, not her own. “Er…in Scotland. But living on a moor, much further south from here.”

The fair-haired wise woman spoke for the first time, and her voice, like her hair, was as smooth and rich as honey. “You’re concealing something,” she said, but there was no accusation in the words, only such infinite tenderness that Tonks felt unexpected tears prickling at her eyes. Suddenly she missed Remus _hard_ , even more fiercely than when she’d first heard he was missing. Tonks saw the mage reach for her partner’s hand, their fingers twining in a sharing of strength and support, and Tonks missed Remus like a hole was being cut out of her chest.

“He’s a werewolf,” she gasped around the pain. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? He’s a werewolf, and he was living with a werewolf pack, and he disappeared.”

The two women both looking down at her like that, with such boundless compassion, was almost the worst thing of all.

“Ah,” said the dark-haired woman.

“If that is the case,” said the fair-haired woman, “if he is a werewolf and his disappearance is otherwise unexplained, it’s likely he was taken by the Snow Wolf.”

Though she’d never heard those words before, they sent a chill straight down Tonks’ spine.

“What’s the Snow Wolf?” she managed to ask, though the words came out on a gasp.

“The Snow Wolf lives near the top of the world, on the archipelago of Svalbard,” the fair-haired wise woman said. “He does not often venture south, not more than once in a generation. But when he does, it is werewolves that he targets. Those who are, like him, both human and not. He is known to abduct them back to his fortress in the north. So far as I know, the Snow Wolf had not left his icy stronghold in many years. Perhaps it was time.”

“But what – what does he _do_ with the werewolves he takes?” Tonks asked, feeling cold shivering all the way through her.

“No one knows for certain,” the dark-haired mage said gently, “since those he takes do not generally return. The Snow Wolf is very powerful, and very, very old. He may use the life force of those he takes to fuel his magic in some way. Or perhaps it simply amuses him to have their mortal company for a while.”

“Remus,” Tonks gasped. She could see him in her mind, in something very nearly like a vision: Remus held captive by a great, white wolf amidst a glittering, terrible expanse of ice. She remembered the dreams she’d had on the fisherwoman’s boat, too, and shivered.

“How do I get there?” she begged the two women. “How do I find this Snow Wolf?”

The women’s gaze never left Tonks, they didn’t turn to look at each other, but Tonks nonetheless felt the ripple of understanding that passed between them.

It was the dark-haired mage who spoke. “Dear one,” she said, “the Snow Wolf is a dangerous predator with powerful, ancient magic. He is difficult to find and impossible to approach in safety. Are you certain this is what you want to do?”

“Yes,” Tonks said. “I’m certain.”

“Very well,” the mage said. “If you are determined, then we will do what we can to help you in your quest.” Her tone shifted, becoming matter-of-fact. “How are you at defensive spellwork?”

“Good,” Tonks admitted. This was one area where she didn’t mind being immodest. Both because it was true, and because there was no point lying about your skills when it came to magical duels. Any untruths would be revealed the moment a battle started. “I’m an Auror with the Ministry of Magic. I’m young, but I’ve trained well.”

The mage gave a thoughtful nod.

From beside the mage, the wise woman asked, “And your heart? You’ll need more than magical ability to face the Snow Wolf; you’ll need great bravery and clarity of heart.”

“I – I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Tonks said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “But if you’re asking whether I’m sure about this quest, or about Remus? Yes, I’m certain. On both counts. I don’t give up on something once I’ve started.”

This time, the two women did turn and look at each other. Then they nodded.

Their decision thus apparently reached, they rose from their thrones and set about preparations. They gave Tonks a thick winter cloak, heavy mittens and fur-lined boots for the Arctic journey she would undertake. Then the fair-haired wise woman told Tonks that she was welcome to stay as their guest in the castle, since night had fallen, and in the morning she herself would bring Tonks to the south of Norway by Apparition, if she wished.

“But that’s as far as I can go,” the woman said. “The witches and wizards of the northern countries are our sisters and brothers, but I myself am of this land. My magic is strongest here, when I am at home in Shetland.”

Tonks nodded, grateful beyond measure to have someone who could take her the next step of the journey – and to have a clear goal at last. She was grateful, too, that she would be crossing the cold, churning breadth of the Norwegian Sea by Apparition rather than in another fishing boat.

Tonks adjusted the clasps of her new cloak and looked at her fair-haired guide. “How soon can we leave?”

“At first light,” the woman said. “There’s no time to lose.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised! This chapter comes to you from the café that's now in the premises that _used_ to be the café where J.K. Rowling would come to sit and write, way back in the beginning when she was writing the first Harry Potter book. I truly cannot tell you how happy it makes me to have the chance to come and write here too.


	4. The Merry Band of Norway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated to [huldrejenta](http://archiveofourown.org/users/huldrejenta/pseuds/huldrejenta), my expert consultant on all things Norwegian!

Tonks opened her eyes, her stomach still churning. Performing her own Apparation never made her feel ill, but going Side-Along did so without fail. Besides, she hated not being in control of where her body went. She'd told her dad that once, and he'd laughed and said that some Muggles were just the same about liking to drive, but hating to be a passenger.

She looked around. They'd landed in a forest where spruces and pines stretched away in all directions, rank upon rank of them clustered so thickly that their trunks obscured any sight of what might lie beyond. Thin patches of snow huddled in the shaded places where the tree trunks stood close together. It looked like winter, though it had been autumn when Tonks left London, and surely that had only been a few days ago?

"Where are we?" she asked.

"Norway," the wise woman replied.

Tonks repressed the urge to say, _Well, I knew_ that _much._

The woman must have seen Tonks' thoughts in her expression, though, because she added, "This stretch of woodlands lies northeast of Oslo, and it continues to the border with Sweden."

That helped, though not a lot. Tonks wished, not for the first time, that Hogwarts did a better job of teaching Muggle geography. Apparition did render finer geographical knowledge redundant, since you no longer needed to know exactly how one place connected to another, but only if you already knew exactly where you wanted to go.

"I leave you here," the woman continued, turning her gentle eyes on Tonks. "I wish I could aid you on your quest, for the Snow Wolf is a formidable foe, but my own land needs me. My own love needs me."

Tonks nodded her understanding, then glanced around, thinking that if her guide was leaving her here, she must have missed some obvious sign of what she was supposed to do next. But no, it was still just woods all around, spruces and pines and low-lying shrubs, identical in all directions. She turned back to the wise woman. "Where do I go from here?"

"Keep walking north," the woman said, "and I believe someone will show you the way soon enough. You've always found help so far, have you not?"

That was true, Tonks had to admit. She'd set out without a plan, foolhardy in the extreme, yet again and again she'd found guidance.

"Farewell," the wise woman of Shetland said, and Tonks was startled to see tears of sympathy pooling in her eyes. "I wish you success in your quest, dear girl. May you find your heart's desire."

Then there was a whirl and a crack of Disapparition and she was gone.

Tonks squared her shoulders and took stock of the trees, the overcast sky, the patchwork of snow on the forest floor. Weak sunlight filtered through the clouds, but it was hard to tell the angle of the sun or the directions.

 _Luckily_ , Tonks thought, _I have magic for that_. She pulled out her wand, performed a directional spell, and started walking.

She walked for at least an hour, her senses alert, but she saw no sign of life in the woods beyond the rustlings of small animals and a few birds alighting in high branches. At one point a wood pigeon landed on a low branch and cocked its head at Tonks in what seemed a rather knowing way, then fluttered away again.

Tonks walked with her wand in her hand, held loosely but at the ready, glancing from side to aside and occasionally performing her directional charm to make sure she was going the right way. And all the time, the woods remained calm and still.

Until they didn't –

"Aha!" cried a figure that leapt out in front of Tonks, dressed in high boots and a coat of leather, with pale hair topped by a bright red cap. The person had a faint lilt of an accent, but addressed Tonks in English. "What have we here? A visitor trespassing on our territory? Who's this strayed into our lands, I wonder, friend or foe or what altogether?"

And then, Auror-trained though Tonks was, the red-capped figure had a wand pointed up under her chin faster than she could blink.

"I'm not a foe," Tonks said. She was careful not to move her jaw too much, with her assailant's wand pressing into the soft flesh beneath it. "I mean you no harm."

"Not a foe, hm? Easy for _you_ to say, but I don't even know you!" Yet the woman – on a closer look, Tonks saw it was indeed a woman – stepped back and removed her wand from Tonks' throat, waving it dramatically in the air instead. "We'll soon find out, won't we? State your business!"

Tonks spread her hands, the universal gesture of nonaggression. It probably didn't help to those ends that she was still holding her wand, but at least she was demonstrating a willingness not to point it anyone – unlike the woman in front of her.

"I mean no harm, and I'm sorry if I unintentionally trespassed on your territory," Tonks said, her hands still extended to her sides. "I'm searching for a friend of mine and I'm just passing through. If you can tell me the way north from here, I'll be on my way and leave your lands."

"Not so fast!" the woman cried, but Tonks thought her voice expressed more enthusiasm than malice. "We want to get a bit of a look at you, see what manner of human or beast you may be. No, no, you're coming back to the camp with me, to meet the rest of my band. And if you're _very_ lucky, we might treat you to a bite to eat before we send you on your way. I do cook rather a good stew, if I have to say so myself since there's no one else here to brag for me."

Tonks made a swift study of the woman in front of her. If Tonks lunged, she was certain she could incapacitate her opponent long enough to get away, with a spell or even with her bare hands. The woman no longer had the element of surprise in her favour.

And yet…Tonks didn't sense danger here, for all this woman had begun their acquaintance by threatening her with a wand. The wise woman of Shetland had seemed certain that Tonks would continue to meet people who could guide her. Perhaps this was another occasion when she should make herself open to a strange encounter.

So Tonks said, "All right. Lead the way."

The woman led Tonks quite a distance through woods of conifers and shrubs and lichens, tromping confidently forward and expecting Tonks to follow. Tonks wondered if she truly controlled all this area as her 'territory', or if it was more that she roamed the woods because she enjoyed the chance of meeting strangers.

The camp the woman had mentioned turned out to be the ruins of an old abbey, where a small band of people had made a home within the crumbling stone walls. What remained of the abbey nestled amongst the spruce trees, its walls now little more than a few pale grey lines disappearing into the muted colours of the lichen-covered trunks. If Tonks hadn't known that what she was looking at had once been a building, she might easily have walked past and not even seen it.

In the central space, what had once been the abbey's nave now stood open to the sky, and in its middle an enormous cauldron burbled over a campfire. The stew inside did indeed smell marvellous. Several people were present, going about day-to-day tasks: tending the fire, mending clothes, and in one case sharpening a wicked-looking knife. The thick rugs rolled up against the open-air walls suggested that the band really did sleep here, out of doors beneath the sky.

"It may not be much, but it's home!" Tonks' guide declared, spinning in a circle with her arms flung wide to encompass all of the abbey ruin around them. "This motley band here's my crew, and if you get on with them then I figure you're all right. Now, I'm Hindrun, and what I want to know is, who are _you_?"

Tonks looked around, and saw all the men and women of the camp watching this exchange with interest.

"I'm Tonks," she said. "I'm a witch, and I'm from England, though I think you guessed that already, since you spoke to me in English from the start. Is that what you wanted to know?"

Hindrun cocked her head at Tonks. "It'll do for now. So!" She clapped her hands, grinning. "Who's for a spot of lunch?"

The others gathered around as Hindrun ladled the fragrant stew into wood-hewn bowls. Tonks counted six other people there, besides Hindrun, but her host told her there were several more who were away from the camp at the moment.

"Scrounging," Hindrun said with a careless toss of her head as she handed Tonks a bowl of stew. "We do what we have to do to get by, and sometimes that means scavenging and sometimes that means stealing, and I'll thank you not to judge us for it, if that's what you were thinking of doing. When you live on the edges of things like we do, you don't get to be so strict about morals like regular folks do."

A band of outsiders, living beyond the bounds of society and scavenging to survive – it sounded a _lot_ like how Remus had described most of the werewolf packs he'd known over the years. "Are you werewolves?" Tonks blurted out, before she could stop herself, and then was horrified. Of all the awful, invasive questions to ask. And of all the people who should know better, Tonks knew better than anyone.

But Hindrun laughed, a big, throaty, unabashed laugh. "No, not werewolves. But – hm, something like that, you could say."

Tonks had no idea what 'not werewolves, but something like werewolves' would be, but she didn't ask. She'd asked too much already.

Instead, she settled back against one of the abbey walls to eat her stew, which was as delicious as it smelled. The man sitting to her left told Tonks nearly his whole life story over the course of the meal, then the woman to Tonks' right did the same. Everyone in this mismatched band had a tale of how they'd ended up living here so far away from everything, and they all seemed to involve heartbreak and loved ones lost or left behind.

Tonks looked across at Hindrun and saw her observing the conversation. Tonks must have looked curious, because Hindrun nodded at the unspoken question. "I too," she said, more quietly than Tonks had heard her speak so far. "I loved a honey-haired lass from across the sea. She came here to study our magic and stayed for a time, but in the end she felt the pull of her own country and went back home. She loves another now." She shook her head, boisterous again. "And _I_ formed this merry band of misfits, and I've never had cause to be sorry!"

There was a fluttering over their heads, and Tonks looked up to see a wood pigeon land on a protruding bit of stone that might have once held a candelabra, when this ruin was the nave of an abbey.

To Tonks' surprise, Hindrun leaned her head back and shouted up at the pigeon, "Dúfa, don't be a goose now, there's no need to be shy. Come down and meet our visitor."

The pigeon fluttered down from its perch, and somewhere in the process of the fluttering it transformed into a plump young woman who landed awkwardly on the stone floor with both feet, blinked, and looked around.

"Hello," she said.

Tonks said, "But! You're –"

Hindrun laughed that irrepressible laugh again. "We're all unregistered Animagi, yes. Come on, didn't you guess? Not werewolves but like werewolves, what did you _think_ that meant?"

"Am I too late to have some of the stew?" the newly arrived young woman asked. She looked perhaps seventeen, eighteen at most, and her accent was much more noticeable than Hindrun's, although she too spoke English for the benefit of the visitor in their midst.

"Not at all, kid!" said Hindrun jovially, jumping up to fetch another bowl. Now Tonks desperately wanted to know what Hindrun's own Animagus form was, but it seemed rude to ask.

Once she'd collected her food, the young woman, Dúfa, came and sat on the floor a small distance from Tonks. She appeared curious to talk to their visitor, but shy.

"I saw you, you know," she said softly. "When you were walking through the woods, I landed on a branch and looked at you. I suppose it was rude of me to spy, but I was very curious."

"That's…all right," Tonks said. She'd never, to her knowledge at least, had an Animagus use their animal form to spy on her before, but she wasn't as annoyed at the thought as she probably should be. The kid seemed sweet. And also way too young to be living such a hard life out here in the woods, no matter how well Hindrun looked after her little band.

Then again, the young werewolf Tonks had begged for news of Remus at the start of this journey hadn't been much older. And at least Dúfa could change into her animal form as she chose, instead of having it forced on her against her will by the rising of the moon. And no one was likely to try to kill her out of fear and prejudice.

"I'm curious, if I may," Dúfa was saying. "Where is it you were going when Hindrun found you? We don't get so very many visitors here."

Tonks set down her empty bowl so she could give the girl her full attention. She'd told this story so many times in the last days, but it never got easier.

"I'm looking for my friend," she said. "My very dear friend. He went missing and I'm trying to find him. I've just learned that he might have been taken by…" She hesitated to say it, not knowing what reaction it might bring. But if she didn't tell anyone, how could anyone help her? "He may have been taken by the Snow Wolf."

Dúfa gasped and nearly upset her bowl of stew. "I've seen him!" she cried. "I saw your friend, oh, I'm certain it was him!"

"You saw Remus?" Tonks exclaimed. She lurched to her knees, trying to get closer to the girl, desperate for any news she might have.

"Yes, yes!" Dúfa gasped, reaching out to grab both of Tonks' hands, forgetting her shyness utterly. "I was flying over the woods and when I saw a white wolf running, I swooped down to see. Oh, it was _terrible_ , the biggest, fiercest wolf you can imagine. I'd heard the stories of the Snow Wolf, but I didn't know if they were true. This wolf was like a nightmare, a nightmare that comes to you out of the far north of dreams." She shuddered, staring at Tonks with wide eyes that remembered the terror of what she'd seen.

"And Remus?" Tonks asked breathlessly. Everyone else in the camp had gone completely still around them.

"He's a man, older than you, with hair going grey and a face that looks kind and weary?"

"Yes!"

Dúfa's hands squeezed Tonks'. "I saw him. The Snow Wolf was carrying him, clutching him in his jaws. But he was alive!" Dúfa hurried to add, when Tonks recoiled. "I don't think he was exactly awake, but I know he was alive. I saw him breathing."

"Where was the Snow Wolf taking him?" Tonks whispered.

"I don't know!" Dúfa cried out, anguished. "I wish I could tell you! I was too frightened, and I didn't follow them to see!"

"I can tell you that," Hindrun said darkly. She'd circled in closer as Dúfa spoke, and now she crouched down next to where Tonks and Dúfa still clasped hands. "The Snow Wolf was taking your friend to his lair, far up in the north, where he lives in a terrible fortress made entirely of ice. I don't know where it is exactly, though, because nobody with any sense goes near the Snow Wolf by choice."

Tonks turned to look at Hindrun. "I've heard his fortress is on Svalbard."

Hindrun shuddered. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Far past the Arctic Circle and nastily difficult to reach. I take it that's where you're planning to go to rescue your friend, am I right?"

Tonks looked at Hindrun. She looked at Dúfa. She looked around at all the band of outcast Animagi who'd been kind enough to take her in as one of their number for the day. And she said, "Yes."

Dúfa cried out, a little wordless noise of distress. Tonks squeezed the girl's hand in what she hoped was comfort and Dúfa stared back at her with terrified eyes.

Hindrun, though, gave an almighty, put-upon sigh. "All right, _fine_ ," she said.

Tonks turned to look at her in surprise, releasing Dúfa's hands. "Fine…about what?"

"I'll take you there! I think you're a fool for seeking out the Snow Wolf, but as anyone here can tell you, I've always been a sucker for a hopeless mission. I'll take you as far as Finnmark at least; you can ride on my back." When Tonks continued to look at her in confusion, Hindrun grinned. "You know we're all Animagi here – didn't you wonder what animal I was?"

She stood up from the floor, striking a dramatic pose. Then her skin gave a sort of whole-body _ripple_ , and she stretched and lengthened and grew, until there before Tonks stood, in all its huge and shaggy glory, a beautiful, long-legged reindeer.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...And now I'm writing to you from Aberdeen. Working my way north through Scotland, I suppose, much like Tonks. ;-)
> 
>  
> 
> A note on the names, for anyone who loves names and languages as much as I do! Hindrun is an invented name, but created in consultation with not one but two(!) Scandinavian friends, built from Old Norse name elements. It roughly translates to "secret deer." (Because she's a reindeer Animagus, GET IT?) 
> 
> And Dúfa is the Icelandic word for dove/pigeon (though it's also an Old Norse name, with a different etymology). In the original Hans Christian Andersen story, it's wood pigeons who finally tell the protagonist where to find her lost friend, and it was delightful to be able to keep that element here in the Harry Potter world of Animagi.


	5. Interlude: The Mirror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [nerakrose](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nerakrose/pseuds/nerakrose) for multilingual translation help. :-)

 

Remus opened his eyes.

He was lying flat on his back, staring up into a blank, white and utterly empty sky. When he turned his head to either side, there too he found nothing but a great white vastness that glittered away into the distance. All around him was nothing but ice.

Remus lifted his head from the ground, straining to look towards the sky in the direction beyond his own feet. The sun was there, barely skimming above the horizon and sending long golden rays across the hard-packed ice. At such a low angle, the sun's light would create immensely long shadows if there were any objects around to cast them, but here the light simply glowed across preternatural flatness.

Remus let his head drop back down against the ice, wondering where he was.

He only rested like that for a moment, though. Lying around and wondering wouldn't get him any closer to an answer. Carefully, Remus sat up, mentally scanning himself for any injuries. A lifetime of waking up after full moon nights, battered and bruised but stripped of any enlightening memories, had left Remus adept at assessing his own physical state. He placed an exploratory hand against his head, then his ribs, and found all to be in working order.

There was a curious…blankness about him, though, for lack of a better word. For one thing, he was wearing the same inadequate cloak he'd had during his weeks with the werewolf pack, and most certainly should have felt bitterly cold amidst all this ice. Yet he felt, if not exactly warm, then at least tolerably lacking in a sense of cold.

And while Remus registered that fear would be a sensible response to finding himself alone in an unknown landscape, that awareness was more academic than visceral. He knew the situation should be frightening, yet somehow he didn't feel that fear directly, only knew that it ought to exist.

Well. His emotions might be oddly dampened, but his capacity for logic appeared to be intact. It was time for Remus to start working out where he was and how to get away.

The sun was setting. As Remus had been getting his bearings it had continued its long, slow, nearly horizontal slide. And if the sun was travelling such a low path across the sky, almost parallel to the horizon, then he must be at a very far north latitude.

The slanting light was stunningly golden, setting the ice all around him ablaze. Remus' breath caught at the sight of such beauty and for a second real feeling flared in him. And in that moment came, too, an understanding of how very far away he was from everyone he cared about, from his friends in the Order, from _Tonks_ –

His heart throbbed at that thought, and with it he became aware again of that piercing, the same as he'd felt when the great wolf's claw touched him, like a shard of ice stabbing into his heart.

The wolf! Where had it gone? It must have been the wolf that brought him here, to this strange world of ice, but where was it now? From where he sat, Remus craned his neck in all directions, looking for a sign of the beast.

When he looked in front of him again, there stood the great white wolf before him, where moments before had been only emptiness.

Remus shrank away from it, a pure animal instinct of recoil from a predator. The wolf was even more massive than he remembered. It towered over him, with shaggy white fur so thick Remus could have shoved an arm into those layers and been buried up to the elbow.

Staring down at him with dangerously intelligent yellow eyes, the wolf stretched its maw into a ghastly approximation of a grin and seemed silently to laugh.

Again, Remus experienced the odd sensation of knowing he ought to be far more frightened than he was. His body had certainly reacted to the predator. He'd leapt back at the sight of it, and even now he could feel how the hairs on his arms stood up. Yet his mind registered primarily curiosity: What was this wolf? Why had it brought him here? And where, indeed, was here?

Remus gazed up at the beast that stood before him. The wolf was an impressive sight, silhouetted there against the golden light of the setting Arctic sun. It raised its head until its white throat arched and its black nose pointed towards the sky, as if aware of the striking figure it cut and deliberately posing to allow itself to be admired. Remus simply stared, from where he had fallen awkwardly back onto his elbows – even though he knew he should fear this wolf, not sprawl on the frozen ground marvelling stupidly up at it. There was something wrong here.

There was something very wrong with _Remus_.

The wolf tossed its head, and Remus must have blinked without knowing it, because when he looked again it was no longer a wolf in front of him but a man. A normal, human-sized man, and yet clearly no normal man at all.

The man's golden hair was a wild mane that tumbled down about his head and over his shoulders, which were clad all in white furs. His face was strong and unlined, yet there was nothing about him that spoke of youth. This man was ancient, powerful and terrible.

He smiled down at Remus, and there were aeons of ice and devastation in that smile.

"Little wolf," the man rumbled. His voice was a deep thrum, a sound that held a purr and a growl at once. "Welcome to my fortress."

There was a deafening crack, and Remus turned to see white walls of ice rising out of the ground behind him. Within moments, a fortress of ice had formed all around them, its walls vast and high but its top open to the sky that now glowed pink with the sunset.

Remus finally remembered he was still resting awkwardly on his elbows, where he'd landed when the wolf first appeared, and he gathered himself and rose to his feet. The man was tall, but not so tall as to tower over Remus. Remus stood and looked him in the eye.

"Who are you?" he asked this man who was no longer a wolf.

The golden-haired man stalked straight at Remus as if he would barrel him over, but at the last moment veered around him instead, pacing in a tight circle with Remus at its centre. Again, Remus felt the hairs on his body stand up at the nearness of this predator. He knew he should be afraid. Why did he not feel afraid?

"You could call me _Sneulven_ ," the man murmured, speaking suddenly so close to Remus' ear that Remus jumped. The man prowled on in his unceasing circle, one hand trailing up to almost touch Remus' shoulder, then dropping away. " _Snæúlfur_ , I'll answer to that name. _Snøulven_. _Lumisusi. Snezhnyi Volk._ Feeble human names, they are, for what name could be anything more than a mere shadow of what I am? Most familiar to you, perhaps, would be _the Snow Wolf_."

He stopped suddenly and turned to face Remus, and Remus was struck again by the terrifying intelligence of those luminous yellow eyes, as arresting in the man's face as they had been in the wolf's. Remus felt a shiver travel the length of his body. And yet the emotions that ought to accompany that physical reaction, any sense of fear or caution or even anger at the way this man had brought him here against his will, remained largely out of reach.

Even his body felt nothing much in particular. The only sensation that was clear and present was the cold sharpness in his heart, as if the wolf's claw had never stopped piercing him.

There was one question, though, that Remus knew must be asked. He met the man's eyes and demanded, "Do you work for Voldemort?"

The golden-haired man laughed, but it was a sound like ice floes cracking, nothing mirthful about it at all. "That little pup? I have heard of him. He is a child, grasping feebly at immortality. No, little wolf, I do not work for your Voldemort." He swept his arm up in a sudden, commanding gesture. "Now, walk with me."

Remus obeyed before he knew he was doing so, his body falling into step as the man led the way along a long corridor of ice that now extended both ahead and behind from the spot where they had stood.

The hallway opened at intervals onto great chambers, all of them vast and glittering and empty. Remus had seen the walls of this place rise up around him mere minutes ago, yet looking at it now he could swear the fortress must have existed unchanged for centuries. The walls appeared to have formed from drifting snow, accumulating layer by layer until they formed an impenetrable mass. The doors and windows looked as though they'd been cut by the wind itself, sheared from the rock-solid ice to leave portals that gaped onto the night. And everywhere the roof was open to the sky, which had turned the deep, otherworldly blue of a long Arctic twilight.

"All this is my domain," the man proclaimed, sweeping his hand to encompass everything they passed as they walked on down the endless corridor. "All this and all the north of the world, every place that is touched by snow for even part of the year, all that is my dominion. Your wizard lords, they come and go in the brief gasp of their human lifespans, grasping for a taste of power. But they have never glimpsed the real thing."

He turned and loomed over Remus as he spoke, his golden hair a wild halo.

"I could snap my fingers, and the birds would not fly south this year," he murmured, his voice setting a hum through Remus' bones. "I could brush the back of my hand against the springtime bulbs where they wait in the earth, and this would be the year when the flowers fail to emerge from their winter sleep. But I do none of these things, though they are within my power, because a world out of balance does not serve my purposes. The world as it is suits me quite well. All I ask is a little amusement from time to time."

Remus looked at the man beside him, and understood that his own presence here was meant to be that amusement.

"Why did you take me?" Remus asked quietly. "I am no one special."

The man tossed his golden head and smiled as he walked on, with Remus following. "You are my favourite kind, little wolf," he said, an icy laugh lurking behind the sharp edges of his words. "I do so like your kind, you human wolves. Even though you are so limited, able to transform only with the waxing of the moon."

He stopped suddenly, causing Remus to stumble to a halt lest he crash into the man's side.

"There is so much I can teach you, little one," the man said, fixing Remus again with his canny gaze. There was some kind of want in his voice, the first time he'd shown anything other than cool amusement. "All the magic and power of my world, I will teach it to you. First, though, you must allow your heart to become cold. Even now, it beats in you far too hot and wild. You care so terribly much, little human wolf, I can see that in you. I smell it on you. You must stay here in my fortress until you've unlearned those hurtful human habits that will only bring you grief and loss."

Suddenly, the man spun away from Remus. "Look!" he cried, arcing one arm gracefully out in front of them.

Remus looked where the man pointed and saw that somehow, while still within the confines of the massive fortress, they'd arrived at the shore of a great frozen lake. Its icy surface was shattered into thousands upon thousands of brittle pieces, each one as smooth as glass and interlocking with the others like an intricate puzzle. Dark water swirled beneath, just visible through the fine cracks between the fragments.

"This," the man beside Remus said, "is my Mirror of Reason. It shows all things exactly as they are."

The man sprang forward, and in the instant it took to complete that motion he was a wolf again, leaping lightly from fragment to fragment of the frozen lake, his enormous paws touching down each time for only an instant before he was once more bounding through the air.

Watching from the edge of the lake, Remus rubbed absently at his face with one hand. Then he looked down, startled at the cold touch of his own skin. His gloveless hands were nearly blue, and he hadn't noticed it happening.

That was enough of a jolt to remind him he needed to pay attention and find a way out of here. Remus shoved his hands into his armpits and focused his mind on the problem.

He was in a land of ice somewhere very far to the north, very far from where he meant to be. He should be living with a werewolf pack in Scotland, gathering information in the effort against Voldemort. Every moment he spent away from that mission, he was letting down the Order, and Dumbledore, and everyone he cared about. He knew this to be fact, even if he could no longer feel it. He must hold onto that knowledge if he was to have a hope of getting away from this place.

The wolf bounded back to where Remus stood at the lake's shore, becoming a man again as it landed beside him.

"Where is my wand?" Remus asked, making his voice firm. He squeezed his numb fingers together as a reminder not to forget the things that were so easy to lose track of when he couldn't feel them. "Did you take it from me when you brought me here?"

"That fiddly little stick of wood you profess to do magic with?" The man set out walking again, skirting now along the edge of the great shattered lake. For lack of any better choice, Remus followed. "You won't need that here, little wolf. We two will have far greater powers. I will teach you all the ways of magic that are beyond the knowledge of mere humankind."

"I don't want to know all the ways of magic," Remus said clearly. "I want to return to the people I left behind. I made a promise to them and I wish to keep it."

"Do you?" The man stopped abruptly short, peering at Remus. His face seemed almost to show…was that sympathy? If not, it was a good mimicry of it.

"Look into my mirror," the man whispered. "Look into the Mirror of Reason, and tell me if that is what you truly want."

Remus looked down into the nearest fragment out of the thousands upon thousands that made up frozen lake. In its flawless surface he saw his own face reflected, starkly clear.

Seen so closely, his face unmistakably bore the countless tiny ravages of time and sorrow and illness, each tragedy of his life made visible in the lines of his face. It was the face of a man who had seen and suffered too much, who'd been broken so many times that he could never again be entirely unbroken. It was the face of a man who cared, just as this Snow Wolf had said, far too much, and yet knew he could not allow himself even that luxury, because he would only end up hurting those he cared about.

Because in the final analysis, no matter how much he tried to outrun the fact, Remus was a dangerous Dark creature. Forever ill, forever out of work – Remus had little enough to offer anyone, and that was even setting aside the fact that once a month he turned into a ravening beast apt to maim or kill anyone who came near him.

Remus looked into the Mirror of Reason, this mirror that showed things exactly as they were, and he saw a man who had already once before lost everyone he loved. He'd been a fool to think he might dare to try again; a fool to think that he of all people deserved to love or to accept love in return.

Distantly, the memory squeezing into his awareness despite the coldness in his heart, Remus thought of Tonks. He pictured her the way he most often saw her in his mind's eye: her head thrown back in laughter, her bright hair wild about her face, all of her in motion.

He saw how joyful she was, how good and whole, and with the last flicker of emotion he was able to muster through the chill that had overtaken his body, Remus wanted fiercely for her to be able to stay that way.

Joyful. Whole.

"No," he said aloud. "There is no need for me to return."

 


	6. North and North Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated to C., who – in a stage production of _The Snow Queen_ I worked on – played the role that's equivalent to the character you'll meet in the second half of this chapter. She's an extraordinary actor, and her portrayal inspired the way I've written the character here.

 

They ran north and further north, Tonks clinging tightly to the back of Hindrun in her reindeer form, stopping only briefly now and then for them both to rest and for Tonks to eat a bit of the food Hindrun had brought. Hindrun herself grazed on lichens and leaves, and grasses when she could find them, seeming disinclined to change out of her reindeer form once she was in it.

The nights were long now – how much time _had_ passed since Tonks left London? – and the northern lights crackled and snapped overhead, great arcs of green that shifted and slid across the dark sky. It grew colder as they went, too, and Hindrun's hooves pounded through deep drifts of snow. Tonks was glad of the warm cloak and boots she'd been given by the mage and her partner in Shetland.

Tonks lost track of the days. She stopped trying to count them and simply gave herself over to the journey, as Hindrun ran through ever deeper snow and denser forests, along mountainsides and past deep, still glacial lakes. Tonks simply had to trust that she would arrive where she needed to be, and that she would get there before it was too late to help Remus.

One day, Hindrun shifted into human form at last. They had stopped for a rest during the brief period around midday when the winter sun traced a low arc across the southern horizon, before sliding away again into the darkness of the Arctic afternoon.

Tonks was crouched against the trunk of a pine tree, huddled inside her cloak and gnawing on a hard biscuit. Their supplies were down to a last few provisions and Tonks was rationing them carefully.

Hindrun, newly human-shaped and stamping her boot-clad feet experimentally in the snow, glanced over at Tonks and said, "This is about as far as I know how to go."

Her voice sounded rusty after many days of disuse, and far less buoyant than on that first day that now felt so long ago, when she'd boisterously assailed Tonks in the woods. Tonks looked up at her friend and hoped she wasn't driving her to exhaustion.

"I know a place where we can ask directions, though," Hindrun went on. "There's a fishing village near here, at the inland end of a fjord, where they'll be able to tell us which way to go on. Sound all right?"

Tonks nodded her agreement. She was so cold and so tired that anything sounded all right, as long as it brought her closer to her goal.

"Right, then," Hindrun said, stamping her feet again like she was reminding herself how they worked when they weren't hooves. "We're nearly to the edge of the town, so I might as well stay in this form. You mind walking for a bit?"

She extended a hand to Tonks, who let Hindrun pull her to her feet.

The walk did Tonks good. She felt more alert once she was moving on her own power through the brisk afternoon air, and she looked around with interest as they entered the village, which was a tidy little grouping of houses all painted red with white-framed windows.

They approached a low-slung building that looked to be the village hall. As they reached the door, Hindrun muttered in Tonks' ear, almost as an afterthought, "Oh, and they're Muggles, so don't mention the whole reindeer thing, all right?"

Tonks was surprised to find herself laughing. During the long, numbing ride it had felt as if the cold leached away her stronger emotions, and it was good to feel them trickling back as they stepped inside the warm village hall.

It was a simple, rectangular room, set up for a feast. Rows of folding tables filled the room, people bustled about setting out dishes, and the wafting scents of food were positively blissful.

"Hindrun! Velkommen, jenta mi!" A woman with a round, smiling face and steel-grey hair pulled back in a neat bun was hurrying towards them from across the room. She said something more in Norwegian that Tonks didn't catch, then the woman reached them and swept Hindrun into a hug. Hindrun laughed and hugged her back.

"Mona," she said, when she'd let go again. She was again speaking in English for Tonks' benefit. "As you can see I've brought a friend along, and she's travelling further north than I know how to go. Can we impose on you to tell us the way, if we describe where we need to go?"

" _Well_ ," Mona said, her eyes sparkling. "If even intrepid Hindrun needs to ask the way, this must be a journey indeed. But first you must have something to eat. You've arrived just in time for our festival dinner and I won't let you go away hungry." She turned to Tonks. "Welcome to you too, my dear. A friend of Hindrun's is a friend of ours." Then she winked. "I hope you like fish."

True to Mona's word, fish proved to be the centrepiece of every part of the meal shared in the village hall that night. There was fish soup and fish balls, fish smoked and poached and pickled and fried. Hindrun pretended for a while that she didn't understand what Tonks was asking about, but finally gave in and explained that they'd arrived in time for the town's yearly fish festival, a long-held tradition because fishing formed such an important part of this coastal town's livelihood.

Tonks and Hindrun were seated opposite each other at one end of a long table that ran nearly the whole length of the hall. A pleasant hum of chatter sounded all around them.

"How do you know the people here?" Tonks asked. She didn't know how far they'd come exactly, but she knew they'd travelled a long way from the south of the country, where Hindrun made her home with her merry band in the ruined abbey.

"I get around," Hindrun said lightly. Then she lowered her voice and murmured, "Reindeer, remember? Migrating is what I do."

Since that seemed to be all Hindrun was willing to say, Tonks returned to spooning up her soup.

But after several moments had passed Hindrun sighed and said, "I'm not from the south originally. I ended up down there because I fell in love. And then the person I fell in love with left, and there I still was. I could have moved north again, and maybe I should have done – don't remind me how absurd it is to spend even part of one's time as a reindeer in a place with so pitifully little snow! But somehow I fell into the habit of collecting others like me, who didn't fit in and needed a home, and I trained them as Animagi so they'd have a way to protect themselves. Before I knew it, I'd made a whole world for myself in the south. I can't leave them now." She gave Tonks a wry look, across the dishes accumulated on the table between them. "They're like family to me. It's not what I set out to make, but I made it all the same."

Tonks thought of the Order, and thought she rather knew what Hindrun meant.

Cautiously she asked, "Am I right in thinking... This person you fell in love with, did I meet her? Was it the woman from Shetland, who brought me here to Norway?"

Hindrun heaved a melodramatic sigh. "She's so detestably loyal to those islands of hers. She went back home, and met that mage, and the rest was history. The awful thing is, they're so perfect for each other, I can't even properly be cross about it. She still feels badly about how it ended, though, so she likes to come over here sometimes and drop off seekers and questers in my woods. She thinks a good puzzle will keep my mind off things." She scooped up a stray scrap of one of the fish balls from her plate and popped it in her mouth. "And the really irritating thing is, she's right!"

Hindrun gave a self-deprecating laugh. Tonks, though, was caught by that realisation, that the woman from Shetland had led her intentionally to Hindrun.

Tonks had felt she was stumbling along, finding clues only by luck. But in fact she'd been helped quite often, hadn't she? The young werewolf had directed her north, which was how she'd found the woman with the garden. And the woman had, in the end, been helpful too, by sending Tonks to sea with the fisher, who in turn had told her to seek the advice of the mage and the wise woman. And they'd been the ones to tell her about the Snow Wolf. The wise woman, too, hadn't taken her to that particular spot in Norway by chance; she'd brought Tonks to where Hindrun would find her. And now Hindrun had brought her here, to this village in the far north of Norway, and they weren't here merely to eat fish soup.

Even as Tonks thought that, the older woman who'd first welcomed them, Mona, slid gracefully into the seat beside her.

"Well?" Mona asked with a smile. "Have we stilled your hunger?"

"Utterly," Tonks said. "Everything was delicious, thank you." She hadn't known just how hungry she was, and how cold, until she'd come into the warmth and finally had enough to eat for the first time in days.

"Now," Mona said, turning her attention to Hindrun across the table. "What is it that I can do for you?"

Hindrun leaned forward, intent, her elbows perched on the edge of the table. "I've heard there's an old, wise woman who lives at the very northern tip of the country, who knows how to harness the winds. And I think she'd be able to tell us how to reach the place we're looking for. Can you tell me how to find her?"

She said this bashfully, much like...well, exactly like someone talking about magic in front of a Muggle, even though she knew she wasn't supposed to. Tonks looked on in surprise.

Mona caught Tonks' look and smiled softly. "Oh, come now," she murmured. "You don't live this close to the world of the Snow Wolf and not learn a little about magic, no matter who you are."

Again, Tonks felt a shudder at the sound of that name. The Snow Wolf.

Mona turned back to Hindrun. "The woman you speak of lives in a lighthouse at the very tip of the land. It's not so very far from here, but it's difficult to find if you don't know the way. Those of us who don't have magic only rarely catch glimpses of her light, when the fog moves in certain ways around the promontory where the lighthouse stands. But I've lived long enough that I've seen the beacon a few times, and I can tell you the way if you're daring enough to travel it." She raised one eyebrow at Hindrun. "Don't tell me more of your secrets than you wish to, of course, dear, but I've always thought you had a few more hidden abilities than you've ever quite admitted to. I don't think you'll have trouble seeing that lighthouse's magical light."

Hindrun coughed, looking embarrassed. "Er, yeah," she said. "Well."

Mona laughed. "It's fine, don't tell me! Keep your secrets. I'd only like to know that you'll be able to keep yourself safe, and your friend here as well."

"I'll keep her safe," Hindrun said. "I've brought her this far, haven't I?"

So Mona sketched a careful map onto the back of a paper that showed the lyrics to a Norwegian folksong, numerous copies of which were on hand for a community sing-along that was to follow the dinner.

Tonks and Hindrun, though, set out again as soon as the meal was over. Mona tried to convince them to stay longer and perhaps spend the night, offering to make space for them in her own home, but Hindrun was impatient to be off, now that they had directions to the location of the powerful witch she sought.

Tonks, too, was feeling edgy and ready to depart. She'd very much appreciated the hearty food and the chance to warm up. But being indoors, in such a normal atmosphere of a village hall and kindly Muggle neighbours chatting – all of it made Remus and the Snow Wolf and his terrible fortress of ice feel very far away.

At the edge of the village Hindrun transformed, Tonks climbed onto her back, and they set off running once again. It was dark, of course, but that hardly mattered. It was dark nearly all the time now, this far north.

They ran all night, or maybe it was more than a night, as time slid away under Hindrun's hooves with the hard-packed snow. Tonks clung tightly to Hindrun's warm reindeer fur, pressing her face into the comforting animal scent of it to protect her lungs from the unforgiving air.

She heard a crackling overhead and looked up to see the northern lights setting the sky on fire, glorious pinks and purples radiating from the horizon, swooping and arching until they filled the whole sky. The beauty of it took Tonks' breath away as she stared up and up into the wheeling colours of the Arctic night.

Then all at once Hindrun skidded to a halt, her hooves clanging out against bare rock instead of snow.

They'd stopped at the top of a rocky rise looking out over the sea. Below them, a narrow causeway led out to a tiny islet of rock. A lighthouse squatted there, solid and square and very white against the darkness of the sea. Its beacon flared in an uneven rhythm – one two… one two… – and the light appeared faint, as though it were shining from far away, even though the lighthouse lay so close beneath them.

Tonks slid down from Hindrun's back, in case her friend wished to transform back into human form, and rested one hand lightly against the reindeer's flank as she stared down at the lighthouse below. A strange mist swirled around it, following no natural pattern Tonks had ever seen. At times it would part completely, then refold itself around the building almost like a set of double doors being slammed closed.

Beside Tonks, Hindrun shivered, rippled, and became human again.

"Yup," Hindrun said, as casual as if the two of them had been chatting back and forth all day. "I reckon that's where she lives, this witch who knows all about the far north and the winds."

As Tonks watched, the mist again parted then shut around the lighthouse below. Staring at the eerie picture it made, Tonks mused, "I wonder how she feels about visitors."

Hindrun turned to her and grinned. "Want to find out?"

There was a precarious path down the side of the outcropping that allowed them, barely, to pick their way down the rock to sea level, then cross the narrow land bridge that connected the lighthouse to the shore. Standing in front of the little wooden door of the lighthouse, Tonks looked at Hindrun and Hindrun looked at Tonks.

"Knock?" Tonks wondered aloud. It felt anticlimactic, after the long journey they'd undertaken to get here.

"Suppose so," Hindrun shrugged. "Unless you know some special secret signal for summoning magic women who live in lighthouses."

"Nope," Tonks said, and she reached out and rapped at the door.

They waited, staring at the unmoving door, for a long time. The strange fog they'd observed from above now swirled about their feet, moving not like any normal fog would do, but like a living thing.

It began to snow, too, big flakes that drifted down all around them until the whole world seemed full of it. Snow landed in Tonks' eyelashes and eyebrows, and she kept having to blink it away so she could see.

They waited in front of the lighthouse door so long that Tonks started to wonder if they were going to have to turn around and leave and find a different way onwards, after they'd come so far to find this place. She felt her shoulders drawing up around her ears and her hands clenching in frustration. It couldn't end here. It _couldn't_.

The door banged open.

"What do _you_ want?" demanded the woman standing inside it. She was tiny, barely as tall as Tonks' shoulder, with wiry arms and a slight hunch to her back, yet she radiated enormous power. Wild grey hair stood out from her head in all directions and her dark eyes snapped at them, keenly intelligent and missing nothing. Tonks was reminded of Dumbledore, if Dumbledore were tiny and fierce instead of tall and almost aggravatingly amiable.

"My name is Tonks, and this is my friend Hindrun," Tonks said, in her best being-very-reasonable Auror voice. "I'm trying to find the way to the Snow Wolf's fortress, and we've heard you might be able to tell us how to get there."

"Huh," the woman said, sounding extremely unimpressed. She scratched absently at her elbow as she scowled at both Tonks and Hindrun. "You seek the Snow Wolf? _You_? What are you going to do, wave your wand at him?"

Before Tonks could say anything, Hindrun answered instead, with a beseeching note in her voice that Tonks hadn't heard before. "My friend isn't as powerless as you're thinking. She's got a pure heart and a strong will. And she's questing for the sake of love, and that still matters with these ancient old foes, I know it does."

The old woman burst out in raucous laughter. "'Ancient old foes'," she repeated mockingly. "What do you know of ancient old foes, little fawn?"

Tonks glanced over at Hindrun, surprised that this witch could guess not only that Hindrun was an Animagus, but even what her form was. Tonks wondered if she was discomfited by being so easily exposed. But Hindrun was busy scowling back at the woman.

"I know enough," Hindrun glowered. "I know the Snow Wolf isn't human, so he doesn't play by human rules. I know we'll never find him if we just walk around looking for him with our eyes and nothing else to guide us. I also know that _you_ have the power to help us, if you decide you can be bothered."

The witch stared back at her for a long moment. Then she made a noise of utter disgust that sounded something like _ekhhh_. "Fine," she said. "You might as well come inside." She stamped away into the building, then waved an arm back at Tonks and Hindrun, calling, "Well? Aren't you coming? You're letting the snow in."

Tonks stepped into the lighthouse, and Hindrun followed and shut the door behind them. Inside was a single large room, perfectly square except for one corner where a wooden staircase spiralled upwards and disappeared into the room's ceiling, leading presumably to some upper chamber from which the lighthouse's beacon sent out its strange and intermittent signal through the icy mists.

"Go on, warm yourselves by the fire," the woman grunted.

Tonks and Hindrun crossed the room to the merry fire that crackled behind a grate in the middle of one wall. Tonks gratefully pulled off the thick mittens the mage and the wise woman had given her, and stretched her fingers out to thaw in the fire's warmth.

"Now then," the lighthouse keeper went on, coming to stand between Tonks and Hindrun and rocking impatiently from her heels to the balls of her feet. The top of her head barely came up to Tonks' shoulder. "What's this nonsense about seeking the Snow Wolf, eh? What's put that idea in your pretty wee heads?"

For all her gruffness, there was also a hint of a lilt to the woman's voice, and it didn't strike Tonks as Norwegian. This woman didn't talk like Hindrun or Dúfa or Mona or anyone else Tonks had met since she first Apparated into that forest of spruces and pines. And yet there _was_ something vaguely familiar about the woman's speech, but for the life of her Tonks couldn't place it.

The woman was looking at her with impatience, so Tonks launched into her story again, telling how Remus had disappeared and how she'd gone out into the world to look for him. And she explained what she'd learned along the way about the Snow Wolf, this ancient being who lived in a land of ice but sometimes came south to kidnap werewolves.

"Everything I've learned about the Snow Wolf fits with what I know about Remus' disappearance," Tonks concluded. "Someone Hindrun knows even saw the Snow Wolf carrying Remus north. I know that's where he is, and I know I've got to go there and find him and bring him back."

"Ha!" The woman burst out with another harsh laugh, then poked one sharp finger into Tonks' shoulder and fixed her with a stare. "Let me give you some advice, from one who knows a great deal more about the Snow Wolf than you ever will."

"Yes?" Tonks answered unwillingly. She had a pretty good idea what the woman's advice was going to be.

The lighthouse keeper dropped her hand to her side and rocked back onto her heels. "Go on home, girl. Only fools seek the Snow Wolf, and fools don't survive the encounter." She gave a wry little cough. "I'm not entirely cold of heart, whatever you may think, and I'm sorry your friend has been lost. But it helps nothing and no one if you sacrifice yourself as well. Go back home. Enough of this, now."

She smacked her hands together, as though brushing the whole matter away, then stalked away from them, to a table along the opposite wall that was piled high with scrolls and books. She began shuffling aimlessly among the papers, for all the world as though she'd already dismissed her visitors' presence from her mind.

Tonks and Hindrun exchanged a look. But it was Hindrun who darted across the room to the woman's side. They made quite a contrast, seen there together: tall, athletic Hindrun with her pale, fine hair, and the tiny, wiry woman with a shock of grey like a cloud around her head.

"We know the Snow Wolf is powerful, but there must be some way to defeat him," Hindrun pleaded. "You have power, too, you can harness the winds – can't you give my friend extra strength so she can fight the Snow Wolf?"

"Strength!" The woman yowled with laughter. " _Strength_ , to fight the Snow Wolf? Are you utterly ignorant, girl? You don't fight the Snow Wolf with _strength_."

The woman's gaze snapped to Tonks, on the other side of the room.

"Listen now," she hissed. Her voice was barely louder than the crackling of the fire, but Tonks heard every word. "This friend you seek, he _wants_ to stay where he is. He thinks it a very fine place! You can be sure that by now he'll have looked into the Mirror of Reason and, _well_! There's no coming back after that."

Tonks felt a chill at those words, just as she'd done the first time she heard of the Snow Wolf. Her voice caught in her throat, but she asked the question: "What is the Mirror of Reason?"

"Mirror of _Un_ reason, more like," the woman growled. "It shows anyone who looks into it the worst possible version of themselves. Of all the Snow Wolf's magicks, it is perhaps the most dangerous of all, for it shows the truth, or at least a version of it. Once your friend has seen and believed the worst of himself, he won't believe any longer in the person he was before. He has no wish to return to you now."

Tonks felt Hindrun's eyes fixed on her in sympathy, as well as the lighthouse keeper's harsh stare, but all she could see was her mind's own picture of Remus, somewhere in an icy wasteland, gazing into a mirror that made him forget himself.

"I'm not turning back," Tonks said fiercely. "You can say whatever you want, you can tell me it's pointless, but if there's even the tiniest chance I can find him and bring him back, I'm going to do it. And if you don't help me, I'll find another way there."

The woman gave a weary sigh, still fixing Tonks with her stare from across the room. "Will you? Hundreds of cold miles across the open waters of the Barents Sea?"

" _Yes_ ," Tonks said.

"Listen," the woman snapped. "I didn't come up here to the edge of the world for the fun of it, you know. I am here in this place to keep balance. I keep the Snow Wolf from extending his reign further south than the lands that have always belonged to him. And I keep fools who come here from the lands beyond his domain, like _you_ , from stumbling too far north, into things beyond their understanding. I tell you again, foolish child _, turn back_."

Tonks stared at the woman, several things falling together into sudden sense. The oddly familiar lilt in the woman's voice. Her admission that she'd come here from somewhere else. Even her use of the word _lost_ to describe Remus.

"You're her sister," Tonks breathed. "Aren't you? I mean: you have a sister, who keeps a magical garden, but you left her behind to come up here and be this…gatekeeper of the north. That's you, isn't it?"

It was only for a moment, but Tonks saw a chink appear in the woman's gruffness. A glimpse of the little girl she must once have been, before she decided to leave everything she knew and take up this role as a protector at the border of the Snow Wolf's domain. It was a glimpse that showed through for only a moment, but it was enough to let Tonks know that she was right.

She pressed on, before the woman could speak and refute her. "Okay. So you had a sister once and you cared about her. I don't know if you still do, but there must once have been a time when you did, so maybe you can understand when I say _that's how I feel about Remus_. Not the same kind of love as for a sister, but the same amount." Tonks found her feet drawing her across the room towards the woman, caught up in the intensity of what she needed to convey. "I care about Remus. I'm not going to turn him over to fate and walk away. You say he doesn't want to be rescued from the Snow Wolf, and maybe that's true, I don't know. But if there's even the _tiniest chance_ that the _tiniest part_ of him still wants to come home – I'm going to find him and give him that chance."

She'd reached where the woman stood by her paper-strewn table. Tonks stood in front of her, silent and pleading to be understood. Hindrun watched them both and seemed not even to breathe.

The woman stared back at Tonks for a very long time. It was so silent in the room that over the crackling of the fire Tonks could hear the wind outside soughing around the lighthouse walls. The tiny, fierce woman with the piercing eyes stared up into Tonks' face like she was taking the measure of her heart.

At last she said, " _E_ _khhh_ , fine! I will put the wind at your back, to carry you across the sea." She snapped one hand impatiently through there air. "Be glad of it, for you wouldn't make it there at all if I didn't. Little deer!" She spun around to Hindrun.

"Yes?" Hindrun asked, startled.

The woman poked her finger into Hindrun's chest. "Change into your animal form and carry her there. Don't tarry along the way. There are Muggles on Svalbard, with their towns and their research stations. Ignore them. Go directly to the northernmost of the islands, where the Snow Wolf's fortress lies. Leave your friend there, at the southern edge of that island, and turn back. Only one can approach the Snow Wolf's fortress, and it must be the one whose heart draws her there." She cocked her head at Hindrun, sizing her up with her sharp eyes. "You're not entirely wrong, foolish little animal though you are: purity of heart and strength of will, these things do matter. Your friend here is questing for love – more fool her! But if the motives of her heart are as strong as she claims, then, who knows? She might yet rescue her lost love. But she must venture there alone if she's to try."

Hindrun looked past the lighthouse keeper, her eyes meeting Tonks'. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Absolutely sure."

Hindrun nodded once, and Tonks saw a little of that jauntiness in her again, the same devil-may-care attitude that had been so striking about her the day they'd first met. If Tonks had to cross hundreds of miles of frigid sea, she couldn't think of a better person to do it with.

Tonks turned to the lighthouse keeper. "I don't know if it matters to you, after all this time. I understand if it doesn't, if that's not the life you want for yourself anymore. But I met your sister on my way here, and she misses you. I think it would mean a lot to her to see you, if you wanted to visit her sometime. Even just once."

The woman cocked her head again, fixing Tonks with the sceptical glare that seemed to be her speciality. But, too, Tonks saw again that tiny flash of the little girl she'd once been – a child who must have loved her sister, and had had her own reasons for leaving, but maybe still lived somewhere inside the woman who stood here now.

"Okay," Tonks said. "Anyway. Thank you for helping us, even though you didn't want to."

"Go," the woman said, but her gruff voice was surprisingly gentle. "Go now. I'll send the wind to lift you up as soon as you step outside."

 


	7. In the Snow Wolf’s Fortress

 

The wind carried them north at tremendous speed, raging in Tonks' ears as she clung to Hindrun's back. It was dark all the time now, an utter Arctic winter that had descended over the world. Tonks hated to think how many weeks or even months must have passed since she'd left London in the autumn, and how long that meant it was since Remus had disappeared.

The cold ocean was a blur of darkness beneath them. The only light in all that long crossing came from the stars that shone overhead, and bursts of colour when the northern lights ripped across the sky, eerie and silent. Nothing in the world felt familiar anymore except for Hindrun, solid beneath her. And even Hindrun would have to turn back and leave Tonks when they reached Svalbard.

Tonks first knew they were descending through the dark night by a dropping in her stomach. Then Hindrun's hooves clattered onto hard-packed ice.

Tonks climbed down from the reindeer's back, stiff after the long ride. The ground that stretched out ahead of them was covered completely in ice and the air was bitterly cold. Beside Tonks, Hindrun shook herself and transformed back into her human shape.

"I have to leave you here," Hindrun said.

Already the magical wind that the lighthouse keeper had conjured was shifting, reversing its direction, impatient to carry Hindrun back south.

"You've done so much for me," Tonks said, stricken to lose this staunch friend. "And you didn't even know me! I was just some stranger who stumbled into your woods."

Hindrun laughed, though her teeth chattered. "Ah, Tonks, you don't have to be so grateful. I told you, I'm a sucker for a foolhardy adventure, and you've certainly given me one of those. Now I'll head back home to my merry band and weave them a tale of our ride over the Arctic seas in the saddle of the night wind. What more could a wandering reindeer wish for?"

"Oh, Hindrun!" Tonks flung her arms around her friend.

Hindrun laughed and hugged back. "Silly girl," she said fondly, when she released Tonks from their embrace. "Go on, go find your lad. I believe in you. You're going to find him and bring him back, do you hear me?"

Tonks nodded, trying to take in Hindrun's certainty and make it part of herself. "I'll find you again," she said. "On our way back, once I've got Remus away from here and we're on our way home, we'll visit you and your band, so you know we succeeded. You'll like him, you'll see."

Hindrun grinned, her teeth chattering in earnest now. "I know I will."

The wind was buffeting about Hindrun's legs, trying to lift her up from the ground.

"Lykke til, Tonks," Hindrun said. Then she pursed her lips and added, "Pass godt på deg selv, nå!"

Tonks didn't have to ask what that meant. The concern in Hindrun's eyes was clear enough. _Take care of yourself._

Hindrun shook her head and shoulders, and even as she moved she was already transforming, elongating into the strong-legged reindeer with the shaggy muzzle and the soulful eyes.

Tonks reached out and rested a hand against Hindrun's humped shoulder one last time. Then the reindeer gave a little leap, and the wind swept her up and out over the dark water. It carried her away until she was only a speck in the distance, and soon she was not even that. Tonks watched Hindrun until she disappeared into the darkness of the winter sky.

Then she turned to face the icy land ahead of her.

The moon was rising now, half-full and waxing. Tonks sucked in a breath of harsh air as she stared at that rising moon, so many questions jostling in her mind. Moonrise and moonset times were vastly different this far north. Now, at half full, the moon still rose and set. But when it was full it would stay in the sky for days without setting, opposite to the sun that never rose. What were transformations like for Remus here, without moonrise and moonset to define their beginnings and ends?

But there was time until the next full moon, and Tonks was determined to find Remus long before that.

She started out over the expanse of ice. Snowflakes swirled towards her, blowing not down from the sky but across the ground. As they came faster and faster, Tonks realised with dawning horror that the snow seemed to be working deliberately to slow her down. Soon she was barely moving forward at all, because all her effort was expended in dodging banks of snow that billowed up around her ankles and needles of ice that drove at her face.

Suddenly, Tonks' vision cleared, the snow no longer in her eyes. When she looked up, the snow that had been attacking her was drawing back, all of it coalescing into a single shape: the form of a wolf.

 _The Snow Wolf himself?_ Tonks wondered with a sharp indrawn breath. But no, it was still only snow. Snow animated by some kind of spellwork, to protect the Snow Wolf's lands.

The wolf reared on its white hind legs. Its jaws, made of snow crystals, opened and silently snarled, and Tonks could see the fierce power in its tensed form. Non-sentient though it must be, animated by magic was still animated. From between diamond-sharp teeth the creature expelled a breath of crystalline ice into the frozen air, readying itself to attack.

Then, jaws gaping wide, it leapt.

" _EXPECTO PATRONUM!_ " Tonks cried, with her wand outstretched. Her own beloved shaggy silver wolf burst forth from the tip of her wand, its teeth bared, and charged forward at a dead run.

Silver met white in an explosion of light, and for a moment the world was too bright to see anything at all as the two shapes clashed. Then the wolf of snow shivered away into a dusting of flakes that sifted down to settle in a fine layer around Tonks' feet.

Tonks' Patronus, no longer needed, faded decorously from sight.

Tonks looked down at the scattered snow around her and blew out a breath. "Right," she said aloud. "Okay, then."

Nothing else attacked as she went on. The air was clear and the stars above shone with a still, white light. And all the time she walked, the moon traced its wide, low arc across the sky. It was sliding towards the horizon at last when Tonks came to a vast wall of ice.

She approached cautiously, her wand at the ready. The pale ice jutted high into the night, disappearing into the black of the star-drenched sky. This could be nothing other than the Snow Wolf's fortress. It glowed an unearthly deep blue, reflecting starlight, and the chill the ice gave off was intense.

Tonks set out along the length of the wall, looking for a doorway. What she found wasn't a door at all but only an empty, gaping space, as though a piece had been sheared out of the wall by an unimaginably fierce wind.

She raised her wand and stepped through. Inside, a single corridor of ice stretched out ahead of her. There was no other way but forward.

So she walked. It was what she'd done all along, wasn't it? Since the day Dumbledore had brought the news to Grimmauld Place, she'd walked across mainland Scotland and the Shetland Islands, then been carried by Hindrun through Norway and over the Barents Sea. And now she'd crossed Svalbard, here to the Snow Wolf's fortress.

The air was crushingly cold, as Tonks walked on in silence down the corridor of ice. Even wearing the cloak, mittens and fur-lined boot that had served her so well through the onslaught of winter, she felt the cold now like never before. And somehow Tonks knew this was a cold no warming charm could defend against.

She passed great chambers of ice, glimpsed through gaping doorways to either side of the corridor, all of them enormous and empty. For the first time, Tonks wondered about the Snow Wolf not only as the malevolent force that had stolen Remus away, but about the being himself. What was it _for_ , all this nothingness? Who would want to live in a palace of nothing?

Then the corridor opened onto a vast space taken up almost entirely by a frozen lake. Its surface was a shattered puzzle of interlocking ice, with dark water visible below.

At the near side of the lake, low to the ground, was a smudge of colour. It looked like a cloak pooled around a human form kneeling by the shore of the lake.

_Remus._

Tonks dashed forward.

She flung herself to her knees and reached out to touch him, carefully, mindful that she had no idea what condition she would find him in.

He was cold. So cold. Tonks patted Remus' face, his hands, and he didn't move. He was like a statue – no, worse than a statue, he was like something cut from a block of ice. Tonks felt at his neck for a pulse and found one, but it was slower than should be possible for any human being who was still alive.

Tonks swallowed down the panic that was fighting to rise. She wasn't a mediwitch. She wasn't equipped for this. What was she supposed to do if she came all this way and found Remus at last and then he was frozen like this and she couldn't revive him?

"Remus," she whispered. She said it louder. "Remus!"

He didn't move.

Carefully, so afraid she might somehow break him if she moved too fast, Tonks slid closer to Remus on the ice. She fumbled to unfasten her cloak, then draped it around both of them. Maybe she could warm him with her own body heat? It was hard to hug someone whose body didn't give at all in reaction, but she pressed her body to Remus' and wrapped her arms around him.

Not knowing what else to do, Tonks started talking. Her jaw bumping against Remus' unresponsive shoulder, she told him her story from the start. About Dumbledore, and the young werewolf who'd been so afraid but had helped Tonks anyway. About the woman with the garden and the fisher with the boat, the mage and her partner, Hindrun and her band of Animagi. The Muggle village, the woman with the lighthouse, Hindrun's heroic leap across the frigid sea. And then this place. But Remus knew this place. He was already here.

Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. Tonks felt them drip from her face down onto Remus' clothing, and she didn't know if that was good because at least they were warm or bad because tears were just another thing that would freeze in the Arctic air. Tonks pressed her face harder against Remus' chest.

One minute. She would let herself indulge in one minute of utter, wretched despair, and then she would pull herself together and figure out what to do.

"Tonks?"

She jerked her head up. Remus hadn't moved, and Tonks couldn't be sure she'd really heard him speak. Maybe it was nothing more than her own desperate wishing.

She glanced down again and saw that the wetness of her tears had fallen exactly over Remus' heart.

What had Hindrun and the woman in the lighthouse said about the power of love in facing ancient foes? Could the breaking of a spell truly be that easy?

Tonks looked up again into Remus' face, searching for a sign that he really did know she was here. Slowly, looking like it must cost him enormous effort, Remus blinked. Nothing more than that, just a slow motion of his eyelids and then once again total stillness.

"Remus," Tonks said. She realised she was gripping him hard around the middle and eased off a bit, though she still held onto him. "It's Tonks. It's me! Can you hear me?"

There was an excruciating pause. Then Remus blinked again. "Tonks?" he repeated. He sounded confused.

Right, first things first. The most important thing was to secure his physical safety; she could sort out his mental state later. "Can you move at all? Do you think you can move your head?" Tonks cupped one hand against the back of Remus' neck, hoping the warmth might help him loosen up enough to attempt movement.

With painful slowness, Remus' muscles began to bunch and contract beneath Tonks' hand until at last his neck turned, and his head moved, and then they were looking at each other face to face.

"Hey, Remus," Tonks breathed, with his nose suddenly mere inches away from hers. Instead of oceans and continents and seasons away. "Wotcher."

Remus' eyes still looked clouded and confused. "I –" he began. His voice was raspy with disuse. "You weren't meant to –" He frowned, the first expression she'd seen on his long-frozen face. Then, when he spoke again, his voice rang out terribly clear in the stillness. "Tonks, you shouldn't have come here."

Those words were like a stab of cold at Tonks' own heart. But she wasn't going to worry about that right now. Physical wellbeing first, she reminded herself, and anything else could come after.

"Do you think you can stand up?" she asked, moving her hands down the length of his torso, trying to feel whether he'd come any more unfrozen.

He didn't protest, so Tonks stood and gently pulled Remus up with her. To her great relief he did stand, letting out a groan but moving without too much difficulty. She wrapped her thick winter cloak around him and took his inadequate one for herself, and fitted her mittens onto Remus' hands. The icy chill bit at Tonks bitterly, wearing Remus' too-thin cloak, but he needed her warm one more. She caught his mittened hands in hers and rubbed them firmly to get the blood moving. Then she looked up to catch his gaze.

"Remus," Tonks said again, because still she could barely believe he was here in front of her. So many people had told her she would fail in this quest. And if she'd refused to believe them, it was only because to believe for even a moment might make failure possible.

But they'd all been wrong. She'd found Remus and it was going to be okay.

"Tonks," Remus said. His voice still had a raspy edge, but it was firmer now. He slid his mittened hands carefully free of her bare ones, and she felt the chill on her skin where he no longer touched her. "Leave here. Go back to London, as quickly as you can."

Tonks was starting to shiver, and she didn't know if it was from the Arctic air and the inadequate cloak, or from the weird, flat certainty in Remus' eyes as they met hers.

"Yeah," she said. "That's the plan. But I'm taking you _with_ me."

"You're not listening," Remus said, still in that strange, firm voice. "You need to return to safety. For me, it's all right that I'm here. Perhaps it's even for the best. I'm a werewolf, Tonks. I'm dangerous. You've always known that. I am a broken old dangerous beast, and it's right that I be taken out of the way where I can't harm anyone. But you must get back to safety."

Tonks gaped at him. They'd had this conversation before, oh, yes, many iterations of it. They'd had the argument where Remus worried he was too old and too poor for her, and insisted that the dangers of his lycanthropy were an insurmountable obstacle, and Tonks told him just as insistently that those things didn't matter when you cared about someone enough. They'd had this conversation. But Remus had never sounded so horrifyingly certain about it as he did right now.

"'Taken out of the way'?" Tonks demanded. "'Dangerous beast'? Remus, _what_? Even if the rest of that were true, that you're so terrible and dangerous – which it _isn't_ – why would that mean you should stay here and _freeze_ to death? Just let me get you away from here, and we can talk about the rest of it after!"

It was like he didn't hear a word she said, standing there stiff as a statue and pushing on with his remorseless argument. "I mean this, Tonks. You're better off without me, surely you realise that. Go home. Be happy. That's all I've ever wanted for you. If I have to sacrifice myself to make that true, it's such a small price."

He said it sincerely, simply, as if there could be no doubt that what he said was right. He spoke like Remus always did at his most kind and rational, the way he sounded when discussing strategy late into the night with Kingsley or Moody, or giving Harry his thoughtful advice. Careful, kind Professor Lupin – _that_ was how he sounded now as he told Tonks to leave him in this wasteland of ice.

Was he still frozen inside, even though his body was able to move again? Was it the cold magic of this place that made him sound like himself and yet so like a callous stranger?

Tonks reached out to him – maybe she just hadn't warmed him enough, maybe she could wrap him up even tighter and this wrongness would right itself – but he stepped back, evading her touch.

"Go," Remus said again, his voice harder than before. "I told you. This place isn't for you."

Only a few feet of icy ground separated them, but somehow it had become a distance they couldn't cross. Tonks stared desperately at Remus, not knowing how to reach him but not willing, never willing, to give up and walk away. And Remus met her gaze placidly, just stood there and looked at her like he was prepared to wait as long as it took for Tonks to see sense and agree with him.

They'd stood a long time like this, stock still in their stalemate, when Tonks became aware that someone else was there with them by the shore of the shattered lake.

She turned her head just slightly, not wanting to let Remus out of her sight, and saw it out of the corner of her eye: a white wolf, shaggy and enormous. A real wolf this time, terribly real, a beast of flesh and blood and muscle, no mere phantasm of snow. This was the creature she'd been warned about throughout her long journey.

The Snow Wolf.

As soon as she made that small motion of her head and saw it, the creature shifted shape. Now it was no longer a wolf that stood there, but a tall, lithe man dressed in white furs, with golden hair that flowed over his shoulders.

Tonks sucked in a hard breath, despite how fiercely she was trying to keep still. The Snow Wolf could take human shape. Why had no one told her that? Remus, who was sometimes a wolf, had been kidnapped by a wolf who was sometimes a man. Was this why Remus didn't want to leave? Was he happier here, with someone who could understand that part of him?

And if so, who was Tonks to tell him he was wrong to want that?

Or maybe she had it backwards, maybe the wolf had used this thing they had in common to trick Remus somehow. Somewhere here, too, was a dangerous, magical mirror, the that one the woman with the lighthouse had described. Was it the mirror making Remus so certain that he wanted Tonks to leave him? If so, Tonks wanted nothing more than to find that mirror and smash it.

The man stalked towards them. He stopped an arm's length away, but Tonks could feel his breath gust on the side of her neck. She hadn't felt truly afraid of his presence until that moment, when she realised that the air he breathed came out not warm but cold.

"So," the man murmured, and his voice, too, was chill and cruel and laced with a terrible amusement. It was the voice of a man who would conjure a palace of yawning emptiness out of ice and populate it with one sole captive. "This, then, is the human who's the cause of all that suffering and caring, little wolf?" He laughed, but his laughter was not a nice sound. It was the sound of a glacier cracking apart and unleashing a tidal wave into the sea. "How very touching."

Remus' body was taut, attuned to the Snow Wolf's every motion, although he barely turned his head to look at him. "Don't harm her," Remus said. "Let her go."

"Harm _her_ ," the Snow Wolf laughed. "I don't care about her. Convenient, though, that she's dropped by to visit us. What a trite little reminder of all you left behind."

The Snow Wolf moved suddenly, and Tonks saw Remus flinch. But the Snow Wolf didn't come closer. Instead he stalked away from them, to the edge of the frozen lake. He prowled along its border, looking down at the jagged, reflective ice, then he flicked his gaze up at Remus.

"Do you remember what that was like, little wolf?" The Snow Wolf's voice began as a low growl and rose as he stalked back and forth along the border between the frozen water and the frozen land. "All the passion, the uncertainty, the ever-present risk of loss! You give away your whole heart and then it's dashed away in a day! You love your friends and then they betray you! They leave you! They die!"

The Snow Wolf went suddenly, preternaturally still and pointed one long arm at Remus.

"Or worse still, it's you, dangerous you, who harms them. What would happen to this pretty young thing if she let herself be linked with you, hm? Do you think that would go well for her? Would it help her to succeed with her career? Improve her social standing, would it, to be known as the consort of a Dark creature, there amidst small-minded human society? But of course, that's all assuming you yourself don't rip her throat out some full moon when you mistake her for your prey."

The Snow Wolf suddenly bared his teeth in Tonks' direction and she saw how Remus tensed, ready to leap in front of her if the Snow Wolf moved. She clung to that as a sign that there was still some feeling in Remus after all.

But sacrificing himself or staying here alone in the Snow Wolf's frozen palace wasn't the kind of feeling she wanted from Remus, not for her sake or for his own. She wanted _all_ of him, all the conflicted, messy, real feelings that made him the person he was. Not the narrow range of emotions that allowed for nothing but noble self-sacrifice.

All the while, Remus didn't look at Tonks. He just kept watching the Snow Wolf with a steady gaze, like he thought what the Snow Wolf said made sense.

The Snow Wolf smiled a smile that was all teeth. As with everything else in this world of ice, the Snow Wolf's hair and teeth and the furs he wore all shone a pale blue in the reflected starlight.

"Oh, yes, my little wolf," the Snow Wolf drawled. "You might have your fun with your human friend for a while, if you wished. But in the back of your mind, all the time, you would be terrified. In fact, you already are. You remember. You're remembering right now, how much it hurts to care. Why would you return to all of that? Stay here with me, little human wolf, and together we will be magnificent. And I promise, here with me you need feel nothing."

The Snow Wolf dropped his gaze once more to the shattered puzzle pieces of the frozen lake at his feet. Remus' gaze followed, as though he couldn't stop himself from looking. The Snow Wolf whispered, "You have looked into my mirror. You know who you really are."

And finally, Tonks understood.

A mirror, the witch in the lighthouse had said, so Tonks had been picturing a mirror like the ones she knew, an old-fashioned wizarding glass with a gaudy gilt frame and an attitude about your hairstyle.

But this in front of her was more terrible than any mirror Tonks had ever encountered in her studies or her years of confiscating Dark objects as an Auror. This mirror was the entire lake. And Remus had looked into it and somehow that had changed everything.

The Snow Wolf laughed, startling Tonks out of her thoughts so badly that she jumped, then silently berated herself for it. She knew better than to give away her reactions in front of the enemy.

"Caught on at last, have you?" he chortled. "Yes indeed, what you see before you is my Mirror of Reason. It shows all things exactly as they are. Your dear friend here studied his reflection in it some time ago, so I'm afraid there are certain truths he understands that you can't hope to match."

Tonks thought fast. The witch in the lighthouse had described this mirror: _It shows anyone who looks into it the worst possible version of themselves_. She'd also said that what the mirror showed was at least partly truth, and that was what made it so formidable. If Remus believed what he'd seen, it was because nothing the mirror had shown him was entirely untrue.

Which meant he also believed the awful thing he'd said to Tonks: that he was a beast who should be kept far away so he couldn't hurt anyone.

Whatever terrible version of himself the Snow Wolf's mirror had shown him, now it was all Remus could see. And how could Tonks help him fight it, when she could only guess what it must be like to look at such a twisted vision of oneself that nonetheless contained a grain of truth? (Remus was, in fact, a werewolf; Remus did, in fact, consider himself a dangerous beast, much as Tonks hated that fact.)

Tonks turned and looked squarely at the Snow Wolf. "I want to look in the mirror."

"No!" Remus cried. He moved at last, but it was only to rush forward and clamp his hand around Tonks' arm, to hold her back from the shattered lake.

And the Snow Wolf laughed.

Had Tonks thought before that his laugh sounded like ice cracking? It was more than that. It was whole worlds breaking apart, rocks shrieking against each other as continents ripped to shards. It made Tonks want to put her hands over her ears and scream.

Instead, she stared down the Snow Wolf and said, "You heard me. I want to look into your 'Mirror of Reason'. If it's so special, let me look, too."

"Tonks, no!" Remus said, low and urgent. "What are you doing?"

She turned to him. Even here, strange and cold and unreachable, Remus looked at her out of the same dear face she'd fallen in love with. He was beautiful to her in spite of, or maybe because of, the worry lines that told of the hard life he'd lived and the grief he'd survived. Here was a man who, against all odds, had emerged a kind-hearted person despite the hell his earlier years had put him through. There was no way in the world she was leaving him here to the Snow Wolf's mercy.

"I'm going to look in that mirror," Tonks told him. "Of course it's a terrible idea, I don't need you to tell me that. But it changed you and I need to understand how, and you don't seem to be in any state to explain it to me. And I don't trust _that_ creature" – she jerked her head towards the Snow Wolf – "any further than I can throw a hippogriff. So I'm going to do what Aurors are trained to do and collect evidence with my own senses. I am going to look in that mirror, so let go of my arm, please."

Once more, they were left staring at each other. Tonks wondered if she was going to have to wrench her arm out of Remus' grasp.

" _Remus_ ," she said, with a lot of weight in that one word. It meant, _I'm trying to save you and you're making it very hard_. It also meant, _I love you, but if you go on like this you are going to break my heart._

Remus stared a moment more, his eyes wide and fixed on Tonks. Then he let her go.

Tonks could have sworn she saw the brief sparkle of a tear running down his cheek as he stepped away from her, but surely that couldn't be right. Remus had shown himself too frozen for anything so hot and human as tears.

There was no time for doubt. She'd only been able to come up with this one plan, and she had to do it before she could second-guess herself.

She ran from Remus the few steps to the shore of the lake. The Snow Wolf stepped obligingly out of her way, smiling that smile full of teeth, and Tonks threw herself to her knees at the lake's edge.

Her eyes sought her reflection in the lake's broken shards. Each piece was jagged around its edges but had a smooth and reflective surface. And there, framed neatly in the nearest one, was her own face.

What struck her first was her extreme youth, unmistakable in the perfect clarity of the ice's reflection. Tonks didn't spend much time in front of mirrors except to confirm that her hair looked the way she'd meant it to look when she transformed it, so she often forgot just how much younger she looked than the people she spent most of her time around: her Auror colleagues and the members of the Order. Forced now to give herself a good look, Tonks was uncomfortably reminded that compared to her friends and colleagues, she was practically still a schoolgirl.

How naïve to think that she of all people could take on the Snow Wolf.

The longer Tonks looked at herself, the more appalled she was by her own hubris. Here she was, this apple-cheeked child with the wacky hair, barely out of Auror training yet charging out into the world uninformed and unprepared (had she really left London with nothing but a cloak and her wand?), yelling to everyone she met about how she was going to find and rescue her love. She cringed as she remembered each of the people she'd encountered along the way, and what they must have thought of her. How kind they'd been to humour her in her foolish quest.

And Remus. Tonks stared at her own youthful face, so untested by the trials of the world, and wondered what in the name of all magic she'd been thinking, to throw herself at Remus. Kind, caring Remus with his lifetime's worth of hard-won wisdom, what would he see in a mere girl? When Remus insisted he was too old for Tonks, that wasn't for _her_ sake he was talking. Remus wanted a partner who could match his wit and experience, and Tonks didn't blame him in the least. Here she'd been flinging herself at him, chasing him clear across the world, and all along he'd been trying as gently as possible to explain that her affections were comically misplaced.

She'd wasted so much of his time already. The least she could do was tell him that she finally understood.

"Tonks. _Tonks_."

She tore her eyes from her reflection in the ice to find Remus' face directly beside hers. He'd dropped to his knees and his hands were on both her shoulders. The mittens lay on the ice between them – Remus had stripped them off so he could reach out to her directly with his hands.

"Tonks? Can you hear me?"

"Yes!" she gasped. "I'm sorry – I'll explain – I've been such a fool."

It was mortifying, the concern with which Remus was looking at her. As if she deserved his concern.

Tonks forced her words out, humiliating though they were. "Look at me chasing you all over the place, as if you would want someone as useless as me! I was stupid to follow you, but not because you don't deserve rescuing. Only because it was stupid to think you would want me to be the one to do it. But I'm going to stop assuming I know better about you than you do yourself. I can't believe I've been running around acting like I know better." Now her nose was running, of all stupid things. Tonks sniffled, feeling about seven years old. Merlin, could anything drive her point home more clearly? "Now I'm just embarrassing myself. I'm sorry. I'll go. You must be so tired of me stumbling around ruining everything."

Somewhere behind her, Tonks was distantly aware of the Snow Wolf's chuckle. "How charming," he rumbled. "Humans. You're all the same in the end. I'll leave you to it, shall I?" His harsh laughter cracked out again, then footfalls receded away and into silence.

Then it was just the two of them left on the ice by the lake.

Remus' hands slid down from Tonks' shoulders to grip her hands. "No," he said. "Tonks, no. You don't ruin things. And I could never be tired of you."

But Remus _must_ think those things! What the mirror had shown her was the truth, Tonks was sure of that. And Remus was too intelligent not to see it: how foolish she was, how unworthy of him.

And yet Tonks also knew with absolute certainty that Remus wouldn't lie.

Slowly, painfully, she pushed logic at the problem. It would be so easy to declare that one or the other must be lying, the mirror or Remus, but that wasn't good enough. She dug deeper.

It was the mirror that had showed her such a pitiful version of herself. Hadn't the woman in the lighthouse warned her of that? The mirror was dangerous not because it lied, but because it told the truth. But the truth it told was only a sliver of the whole.

Tonks looked again to her own reflection in the ice.

Looking at herself was like looking at pictures painted on layers of glass, each one transparent enough to leave the next visible below it. Tonks was many things. She was the determined Auror she knew herself to be, who'd set out on a quest and wouldn't take no for an answer. She was also the inexperienced young woman she saw reflected in the smooth lake ice, tangling with forces beyond her knowledge. Those could both be true without conflict.

And Tonks loved Remus, that was a true thing that burned inside her. But she looked in the mirror's cold reflection and saw all the times he'd tried to express his very real doubts, while she'd barrelled past him with youth's certainty that love can always conquer all. She loved Remus, yet how could she claim to love someone she refused to really hear?

Tonks closed her eyes and focused. With effort, she could hold all these layers of herself in her mind's eye at once, and each could be true without causing the others to be lies.

But the mirror's pull was strong. If she looked into it again, she might well have to start all over again with the work of remembering. How much worse must it be for Remus, who had spent so much more time in front of the mirror, and had so much more about himself that he already believed was not worthy of love.

Tonks opened her eyes, careful to look only at Remus, not down at the mirror of ice. "Please, listen to what I'm going to tell you," she begged him. "Listen to this all the way through, because I want you to understand what I see. Is that all right?"

Remus nodded, his eyes fixed on hers.

She gazed back at him, clutching his hands. "When I look into this mirror, I see someone who's young and naïve – a clumsy, clinging child who's so far out of her depth that she doesn't even know it." Remus started to protest, but she squeezed his hand, asking him to wait. "That's not most of who I am, I know that. But there's that little bit of it that's true. There _is_. And this mirror finds that one tiny part and twists it and makes it bigger, until when I look in the mirror, that's the only part I can see. And if I sat here long enough, if this mirror were all I could see, of course I would come to believe this one tiny part is all that I am."

Tonks was gripping Remus' hands so hard that her knuckles ached in the freezing air. She didn't know if he understood, but he was listening.

"That's how the mirror sees me," she said gently. "Now, I'd like to ask: how do _you_ see me?"

He didn't hesitate at all. "I see someone selfless and brave. Someone who fights for what's right no matter the cost to herself, and who never lets anyone tell her no, not when lives are at stake." There was still a rasp of hoarseness in Remus' voice from long disuse and he had to clear his throat to go on, but he wasn't finished speaking. "When I look at you, I see the person who is my idea of joy."

Tonks' cheeks burned. She hadn't meant to make him list out her praises.

"Right," she hastened on, before he felt obliged to add more. "And all those really flattering, lovely things you just said, they sound like they couldn't possibly belong to the same person I saw in the mirror, right? But they do, all of those different things can be true about one person. Does that make sense? That the mirror could show one thing about me, the very worst of me, and it still doesn't make the things you believe about me _not_ true?"

Slowly, Remus nodded. "Yes," he said. And then, "Yes, of course. If the mirror shows only part of you, then that's only part of the truth."

Tonks took a deep breath. Now the hard part.

"Would you look in the mirror?" she asked.

Beside her, Remus shuddered.

Tonks shivered too, in sympathetic pain. How long already had he knelt here alone, staring into the frozen lake, seeing and believing the worst of himself?

"This time, I'll be here with you," she said.

He nodded tightly. Tonks released one of his hands, so he could turn to face the smooth surface of the lake, but she held onto his other hand. Not being alone when he looked at this terrible reflection, that had to count for something.

Remus gazed into the ice in silence.

Tonks asked, and hated to ask, "What do you see?"

"Tonks –" Remus' voice broke over her name. "You know what I see. Please don't make me repeat it."

"Remus –" Her voice quavered and she had to start over. "Remus. Okay, you looked in the mirror. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Now, look at me. Please."

Slowly, he turned away from the ice and looked at her. His eyes were sad and so very weary. Tonks reached up her free hand to cradle his jaw.

"Now I'll tell you what I see," she said softly. "I see a dear man who is so kind to his friends and so generous with his students. Someone who's willing to think the best of people even when, frankly, they don't always deserve it. Someone who's been torn down by life, not once, but again and again, and somehow keeps getting back up stronger than before. Someone who's never lost his wicked sense of humour. Who's clever and capable and, yes, gorgeous – no, shut up –" This because Remus had given a snort of disbelief – "And all those things are _true_ , Remus. What you see when you look in the mirror may be true, but what I see when I look at you is also true. Do you see?"

Remus was silent for a long time. Tonks remembered how hard this was, overlaying the seen on top of the remembered. She waited.

"It's very difficult," he said at last. His eyes flicked to the ice and the reflection it showed, then back to Tonks. "I've been living with my truth a long time."

Tonks fought down the urge to argue, to shout and debate until she convinced Remus that her truth was just as real as his own. But that wasn't fair of her. He had to see it for himself.

All she could do was hope he hadn't spent so long in front of the Snow Wolf's mirror that he could no longer see anything else at all.

At long last he said quietly, "I want to believe you."

Again Tonks had to fight against the desire to shout, _Then do it! Just believe me!_

Instead, she pressed her hand against his cheek and made herself speak as quietly as he did. "What would help you to believe?"

Remus leaned into her hand almost unwillingly, like he couldn't keep himself from seeking the warmth of that comfort. "Time, I suppose. Enough time to hear it many times and practise trying to believe it. Maybe more time than the world has to offer." He gave a wry, unhappy laugh that turned worryingly into a cough halfway through, and Tonks was reminded yet again how long he had spent here in the cold.

"We have time!" she said. "That's something we have. And I will keep telling you how I see you as often as you need to hear it. Believe me, it's no hardship." She reached down and took both his hands in hers again.

Remus looked down at their joined hands, then up to meet her eyes. He said very seriously, "Tonks, I will always be a dangerous Dark creature. That will never change."

"You're a werewolf, yes, I know. It's not like you'll ever let me forget it." Tonks heard how flippant that sounded and bit her lip. "Remus, I'm sorry. All the time I've known you I've been trampling over your concerns, telling you they didn't matter. I get that they matter. I get that you have very real things in your life that make this hard. I'm sorry I acted like we could just skip past the part where we talk about the hard stuff. But I want you to know that there is nothing about you that scares me away. And I will never stop telling you that I choose you anyway."

As she spoke, Tonks could see her breath forming fog in the air between them, but she'd stopped feeling the cold on her skin at all. That was probably a bad sign.

Remus looked at her and said, "You're shivering."

Tonks shook her head, even though it was true.

Just as she had done for him before, Remus now pulled open the folds of the thick winter cloak and wrapped it around them both. They were both still kneeling on the ice, but inside the cloak Remus wrapped his arms around Tonks and pulled her to his chest. Warmth returned to her, and she could feel the wild pounding of Remus' heart where her body pressed against his. His heart was not frozen now.

His voice muffled against Tonks' hair, Remus said almost musingly, "The creature who brought me here, the Snow Wolf, promised I could stay with him and learn to feel nothing. When you've lost everyone you cared about, when you've failed the people you loved and lived ever since with the grief and guilt, that's a seductive offer."

Tonks could still feel his heart pounding, but he felt otherwise calm in her arms.

"And yet," Remus said with wonder, "I don't want to feel nothing. I want to keep living, no matter how much pain it brings. Does that make me a fool?"

"No," Tonks said softly. She pulled back, just enough to see him. She wanted to be able to see him. "It makes you human, Remus."

He smiled at that. There was a reason Tonks had always loved Remus' smiles best of all. They transformed his face from one that was kind but weary into one that was beautiful.

"Strictly speaking," he murmured, "I'm _not_ human, I'm –"

"A _werewolf_ , I know. And you're still a person. The best one I know. So will you come home, Remus, please?"

Remus gazed at her. She waited, her chest tight and her heart in her throat, as she saw his mouth silently test out the shape of that word. _Home_.

Because Remus never said _home_. The old Black family house was _Grimmauld Place_ or _Sirius' house_ or _Headquarters_ , never mind that Remus too had lived there for a year before Sirius died. Remus was so certain in his belief that he belonged nowhere, and he was careful, always, not to let slip the slightest hint that he might wish it were otherwise. Remus never laid claim to anyone or anywhere.

Slowly, like he couldn't quite believe it himself, Remus smiled. "Yes," he said. "Let's go home."

And Tonks' chest unclenched at last. All the terror she'd been carrying inside her melted away. She laughed aloud, giddy with relief, and pulled Remus close and kissed him. Remus wrapped his arms tightly around her and kissed her back and it was the best and easiest and most dazzling thing in the world.

Behind her, something snarled.

The sound of it shook the ground and sent a shudder of animal fear through Tonks' bones. In that first moment she felt Remus' arms tighten instinctively around her, then their training kicked in and they were both on their feet, the cloak falling away from their shoulders as they spun around to face the threat.

The Snow Wolf had returned in wolf form. He stood in front of them, all four massive legs planted wide and his teeth bared. The lake was to their backs and they were trapped.

Tonks had drawn her wand from the moment she stood, but Remus was empty-handed. "Do you have your wand?" she muttered out of the side of her mouth.

"He took it away when he brought me here," Remus murmured. "But it doesn't matter. Tonks, there isn't a lot a wand can do against a wolf like this."

But Tonks raised her wand, because no matter what she was going to try anyway.

"Wait!" Remus said. Tonks glanced over at him, quickly, not wanting to take her eyes from the wolf. Remus looked stricken. "Please. Don't put yourself in danger. This is my fight."

Tonks grimaced at him to show what she thought of Remus confronting the Snow Wolf without even a wand. But pain was visible on his face at the thought of Tonks endangering herself for his sake, and that was enough to make her hold back and listen to whatever alternate plan he had. She held her wand high and kept her body poised to attack, but she waited.

Remus stepped closer to the wolf.

"You don't want me," he said. His voice was soft and unthreatening. "Don't you see how full of love my heart is? How hot and messy with human feelings? I care so much, you said it yourself the day you brought me here. You said it as if that were a weakness, but I don't believe it is. Yes, it brings me grief and suffering. Yes, I have lost friends and mourned them. And yes, I have sometimes thought I would be better off dead, or far away, than bringing any more grief to the people I care about. A part of me believed that, and when I looked in your mirror I believed it was the only truth."

He took a step even closer to the Snow Wolf, so he stood nearly nose to muzzle with the huge beast. Tonks shivered and clung to her wand, but she knew she could do nothing to help him, only stay still and watchful.

"I don't believe that anymore," Remus told the Snow Wolf. He sounded very gentle when he said it. "I don't believe that's the only truth. You must surely be able to see that I'm of no use to you, because my heart will never freeze the way you want. You might as well let me leave."

The wolf pulled his lips back further, revealing the full length of his terrible teeth. Tonks tensed. But the wolf didn't move, only stared at Remus with his yellow eyes.

It seemed an aeon that they stood there, the Snow Wolf and Remus.

At last the wolf growled, low in his throat, and Tonks felt all the hairs on her body stand up. The wolf tossed his head and gave one wild snarl.

Then he turned and stalked away.

Two steps, three, then with a bounding leap he was out onto the frozen lake and darting away across the shattered ice. In no time at all he was far in the distance, then gone down another long corridor at the far end of the lake.

Tonks turned to Remus, grinning as relief crashed over her. She opened her mouth to congratulate him – he'd talked down an ancient beast with only the power of his words, how was _that_ for success? – when the ground beneath them shook so violently that she stumbled and cried out.

Remus staggered too, as the frozen ground lurched from side to side. The two of them managed to flounder towards each other and grab one another's arms, holding themselves steady as the world swayed around them.

"What –?" Tonks gasped.

A deafening roar sounded from every direction, and Tonks looked up to see the high ice walls of the fortress crumbling.

"Get down!" she cried, and they did, dropping to the ground as the world around them convulsed. They clung to each other as it went on and on, the clamour of all that massive ice cracking and splintering.

The noise stopped. Cautiously, Tonks slid free of Remus' arm and lifted her head.

The fortress of ice had disappeared. The shattered lake was gone. There was nothing left but a great empty expanse of ice under the dark sky full of stars.

Remus sat up. He reached for Tonks' hand, and she squeezed back gladly.

"Is it _gone_?" she asked. It seemed impossible that something so huge could simply disappear.

Remus shook his head. "I don't think so. I think it's simply…returned to some other state it abides in when no one's here. This is how this place looked when I arrived. Only emptiness and ice."

A few feet away from them, something thin and dark rested on the pale ground. Tonks checked instinctively for her wand, but it was still safely in her hand. She nudged Remus' shoulder and pointed at the wand that could only be his.

He jolted to his feet and rushed to pick it up. Tonks knew how desperately she would want her own wand back if she were without it for even a short time, let alone for months of captivity. When Remus turned back to look at her, his wand safely returned to his hand, his face was radiant.

" _Lumos_ ," he murmured, holding his wand reverently, and a corona of light expanded from its end, all the brighter for being set against the surrounding darkness.

The light cast a soft glow on Remus' face, transforming his tired lines into something gentler. Tonks' heart throbbed with love for this man who had suffered so much, yet still could cast the simplest of spells with such genuine wonder and joy.

With a rippling overhead, as if in response to Remus' charm, the northern lights began to dance. Bright greens and purples and pinks and blues, more colours than Tonks had seen in all the long Arctic nights of her journey, swept across the wide sky. Tonks felt the hair at the nape of her neck prickle with the otherworldly beauty of it. She gasped and grabbed for Remus' hand to share her delight.

" _Nox_ ," he whispered. The light of his wand went out and they were alone under the symphony of the northern sky.

With Remus' hand in hers, Tonks craned her neck up and gazed into those arches of colour, shifting endlessly into new formations of wild, glorious brightness.

"I can see," Tonks said, when she could finally catch her breath again, "why people live up here. Despite everything."

Remus squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back. "But let's go home."

Tonks stooped to pick up the winter cloak that had fallen when the Snow Wolf appeared and draped it once again around Remus' shoulders. It sat well on him, and Tonks thought she'd try to talk him into keeping it. That was to say, if the mage and her partner didn't want it back.

"Listen," she said, "the only hard part is getting off this island, but I've got a hunch that if we walk back to the southern edge, there will be a wind waiting to carry us across the ocean. Once we get to the mainland there's a lighthouse, and even if we can't find the lighthouse, I know a woman in a village nearby who can give us directions south. Because I have a friend in the south of Norway I really want you to meet. From there, I can probably Apparate us home, but if not, Hindrun will show us the way."

Remus was looking at her with amazement. "Exactly how many adventures did you go through to find me here?"

"That's barely half of them!" Tonks laughed. It felt good to be able to laugh about it.

With a note of caution in his voice, Remus said, "The full moon is only a few days away. If we won't make it back to England in time, it might be better to wait, or to travel separately, if –"

Tonks thought of Hindrun's merry woodland band of outcasts. A band of Animagi, capable of taking animal form and thus in no danger should they happen to encounter a werewolf in their woods. And she thought of the convivial atmosphere, with hearty stew bubbling over a campfire and everyone gathered close and sharing stories. An ideal place for convalescing after a taxing physical transformation.

"I know exactly where we can stop for the full moon," she told Remus, and she said it with such conviction that he didn't even protest, just looked at her and nodded.

Tonks gazed out ahead of them over the expanse of ice. The northern lights had faded now to a glimmer of green, sliding in slow, sweeping arcs. The icy ground shimmered with a faint reflection of that colour, a ghost of the green night sky.

She sensed they were facing south, but cast a directional spell just in case. Yes, magic confirmed what instinct had told her: she and Remus stood looking south at last. Towards the lighthouse keeper who could harness the winds. Towards Hindrun and her band. Towards friends and Hogwarts and London and the Order of the Phoenix.

Tonks tucked her wand carefully inside her cloak, keeping it in easy reach just in case, and Remus did the same. She took Remus' hand, because after all their time apart, this felt like a small but necessary extravagance: to allow themselves the luxury of walking hand in hand.

Remus again swept the warm winter cloak wide, so it spread over both of them. He turned to smile at Tonks, and she smiled back, so widely that her face hurt with happiness. Remus' hand squeezing hers was warm, not ice. His heart beating in his chest was not ice. She'd made sure of that, and he'd done the rest by standing up to the Snow Wolf, and they would figure the rest out in time.

"Shall we?" Remus asked. His voice was gentle and kind and a little bit hoarse, and just hearing it made Tonks ache with gladness.

"We'd better," Tonks agreed. "I think the Order needs us."

Then they set out walking, side by side. Going home.

.

**_~The End~_ **

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end! I hope you've enjoyed this story. It seems incredible now, but I spent over a year – off and on – writing and then editing it, and it's full of my love for these characters and for this sort of fairy tale fusion story. :-) 
> 
> If you'd like to read yet more Remus/Tonks from me, [ every single one my Remus/Tonks stories are collected here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/139107). Or go straight to my R/T epic: the ["Be the Light in My Lantern"](https://archiveofourown.org/series/325274) series.
> 
> If you're here for the fairy tale fusion, you might enjoy [Fantastic Beasts and How to Win Their Hearts: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4978381/chapters/11434138), a Remus/Sirius "Beauty and the Beast" retelling written in collaboration by stereolightning and me.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading. <3


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